Prioritizing Program Elements: A Pretesting Effort to Improve Software Quality

Table 11

Comparison of existing work on code prioritization with our work.

Comparison criteria	Li’s work [47]	This work
Aim of code prioritization	Quickly improve code coverage (control-flow-based coverage)	Quickly improve user’s perception on the reliability of the system
Priority level	Line of code or block	Method or class
Analysis point	Structural	Structural and behavioral
Factors for prioritization	Number of lines of code covered	Influence, execution time, structural complexity, severity, and business value
Intermediate graph used	Control flow graph	ESDG (both data and control flow)
Fault criticality	Equal importance to the discovery of each fault	Faults in high-priority areas are more critical and hence are given more importance.
Effectiveness	Finding more numbers of bugs	Finding bugs that have more contribution to unreliability