FastLane: Test Minimization for Rapidly Deployed Large-scale Online Services

  • Ranjita Bhagwan ,
  • Adithya Philip ,
  • Rahul Kumar ,
  • Chandra Maddila ,
  • Nachi Nagappan

International Conference on Software Engineering |

Organized by IEEE CS and ACM

Today, we depend on numerous large-scale services
for basic operations such as email. These services, built on the
basis of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
processes, are extremely dynamic: developers continuously com-
mit code and introduce new features, functionality and fixes.
Hundreds of commits may enter the code-base in a single day.
Therefore one of the most time-critical, yet resource-intensive
tasks towards ensuring code-quality is effectively testing such
large code-bases.
This paper presents FastLane, a system that performs data-
driven test minimization. FastLane uses light-weight machine-
learning models built upon a rich history of test and commit logs
to predict test outcomes. Tests for which we predict outcomes
need not be explicitly run, thereby saving us precious test-
time and resources. Our evaluation on a large-scale email and
collaboration platform service shows that our techniques can
save 18.04%, i.e., almost a fifth of test-time while obtaining a
test outcome accuracy of 99.99%.