Sequence Covering Array Generator (SCAT) For Sequence Based Combinatorial Testing

摘要

Complementing existing test design techniques (e.g. boundary value analysis, equivalent partitioning and cause and effect graphing), t-way testing is a test design technique that specifically used to cater bugs due to interaction. Many t-way strategies have been proposed in literature including General T-way (GTWay), In Parameter Order General (IPOG), Automatic Efficient Test Generator (AETG), and Jenny for the past 20 years. Although proposed t-way strategies have been proven to detect bugs (in many published case studies demonstrate that the effectiveness of t-way test suite comparable to exhaustive test suite), these strategies only focus on sequence-less interaction. For control and reactive system (i.e. input signals arrived at different time), the implementation of sequence-less t-way strategy is not possible. As a result, researchers nowadays start to focus on sequence based t-way strategy. Just recently, several sequence based t-way strategy has been proposed in literature (e.g. T-Seq, Answer Set Programming (ASP), Upper Bound (U) and Upper bound Reversal (Ur)). However, as generating t-way test suite is an NP-Hard problem, no single strategy can claims it producing the optimal test suite for every system configuration. Motivated by the aforementioned challenges, this paper presented a new t-way strategy, named Sequence Covering Array Generator (SCAT), which support sequence based t-way test suite generation. Experimental result demonstrates that in most cases SCAT produces moderate results compare to other competing strategies in terms of generated test suite size.