RETORCH: an approach for resource-aware orchestration of end-to-end test cases

Continuous integration practice mandates to continuously introduce incremental changes into code, but doing so may introduce new faults too. These faults could be detected automatically through regression testing, but this practice becomes prohibitive as the cost of executing the tests grows. This problem is preponderant in end-to-end testing where the whole system is requested for test execution. However, some of these test cases could be executed with fewer resources (e.g., memory, web services, computation, Cloud instances, among others), by deploying only the subsystems needed by each test. This paper is focused on the optimization of the resources employed in end-to-end testing by means of a resource-aware test orchestration technique in the context of continuous integration practices in the Cloud. The RETORCH approach proposes a novel way to identify the resources required by end-to-end test cases and to use this information to group together those tests requiring equivalent resources. Besides, the approach proposes to deploy the grouped tests in isolated and elastic environments, so that their execution can be scheduled in parallel on several machines. RETORCH is exemplified with a real-world application, and its performance evaluation shows promising savings in terms of resource usage and time.