Reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to prioritizing test cases in Continuous Integration (CI) testing, where the reward plays a crucial role. It has been demonstrated that historical information-based reward function can improve the effectiveness of the test case prioritization (TCP). However, the inherent character of frequent iterations in CI can produce a considerable accumulation of historical information, which may decrease TCP efficiency and result in slow feedback. In this paper, the partial historical information is considered in the reward computation, where sliding window techniques are adopted to capture the possible efficient information. Firstly, the fixed-size sliding window is introduced to set a fixed length of recent historical information for each CI test. Then dynamic sliding window techniques are proposed, where the window size is continuously adaptive to each CI testing. Two methods are proposed, the test suite-based dynamic sliding window and the individual test case-based dynamic sliding window. The empirical studies are conducted on fourteen industrial-level programs, and the results reveal that under limited time, the sliding window-based reward function can effectively improve the TCP effect, where the NAPFD (Normalized Average Percentage of Faults Detected) and Recall of the dynamic sliding windows are better than that of the fixed-size sliding window. In particular, the individual test case-based dynamic sliding window approach can rank 74.18% failed test cases in the top 50% of the sorting sequence, with 1.35% improvement of NAPFD and 6.66 positions increased in TTF (Test to Fail).

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to optimize the continuous integration (CI) testing, where the reward plays a key role in directing the adjustment of the test case prioritization (TCP) strategy. In CI testing, the frequency of integration is usually very high, while the failure rate of test cases is low. Consequently, RL will get scarce rewards in CI testing, which may lead to low learning efficiency of RL and even difficulty in convergence. This paper introduces three rewards to tackle the issue of sparse rewards of RL in CI testing. First, the historical failure densitybased reward (HFD) is defined, which objectively represents the sparse reward problem. Second, the average failure position-based reward (AFP) is proposed to increase the reward value and reduce the impact of sparse rewards. Furthermore, a technique based on additional reward is proposed, which extracts the test occurrence frequency of passed test cases for additional rewards. Empirical studies are conducted on 14 real industry data sets. The experiment results are promising, especially the reward with additional reward can improve NAPFD (Normalized Average Percentage of Faults Detected) by up to 21.97%, enhance Recall with a maximum of 21.87%, and increase TTF (Test to Fail) by an average of 9.99 positions.

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