Identifying root causes of test failures

Abstract

A disclosed method defines root cause failure categories for a test case and associates each category with a corresponding test configuration property. Test configuration property information, indicative of the test configuration properties, are embedded in test case metadata. After generating test results, including test script messages, the test script messages assessed to identify the 'N' most significant keywords in the message. The significance of a term in the test script message may be calculated based on an inverse document frequent parameter, independent of the term frequency within the document. Test result groups may then be determined by invoking a suitable clustering algorithm, e.g., a k-means clustering algorithm, to cluster the test script messages based on their corresponding keyword sets. Hypothesis test statistics may then be calculated for each test result group. A most probable root cause may then be identified for some or all of the test result groups.