Methods and tools for focusing and prioritizing the testing effort

Software testing is essential for any software development process, representing an extremely expensive activity. Despite its importance recent studies showed that developers rarely test their application and most programming sessions end without any test execution. Indeed, new methods and tools able to better allocating the developers effort are needed to increment the system reliability and to reduce the testing costs. In this work we focus on three activities able to optimize testing activities, specifically, bug prediction, test case prioritization, and energy leaks detection. Indeed, despite the effort devoted in the last decades by the research community led to interesting results, we highlight some aspects that might be improved and propose empirical investigations and novel approaches. Finally, we provide a set of open issues that should be addressed by the research community in the future.