Constructing test suites for interaction testing 论文

摘要

Software system faults are often caused by unexpected interactions among components. Yet the size of a test suite required to test all possible combinations of interactions can be prohibitive in even a moderately sized project. In-stead, we may use pairwise or t-way testing to provide a guarantee that all pairs or t-way combinations of compo-nents are tested together. This concept draws on meth-ods used in statistical testing for manufacturing and has been extended to software system testing. A covering array, CA(N; t; k; v), is an N k array on v symbols such that every N t sub-array contains all ordered subsets from v symbols of size t at least once. The properties of these objects, however, do not necessarily satisfy real software testing needs. Instead we examine a less studied object, the mixed level covering array and propose a new object, the variable strength covering array, which provides a more robust environment for software interaction testing. Initial results are presented suggesting that heuristic search tech-niques are more effective than some of the known greedy methods for finding smaller sized test suites. We present a discussion of an integrated approach for finding covering arrays and discuss how application of these techniques can be used to construct variable strength arrays. 1.