ACombinatorial Approach for the Reduction of Test Cases

Abstract

Combinatorial testing has attracted a lot of attention from both industry and academia. A number of reports suggest that combinatorial testing can be effective for practical applications. However, there are few systematic, controlled studies on the effectiveness of combinatorial testing. The behavior of a software application may be affected by many factors e.g input parameters, environment configurations and state variables .It is impractical to test all possible combinations of values of all those factors. Instead of testing all possible combinations, a subset of combinations is generated to satisfy some well-defined combination strategies. A key observation is that not every factor contributes to every faultand it is often the case that a fault is caused by interactions among a few factors. Combinatorial design can dramatically reduce the number of combinations to be covered.Thisrequires indepth knowledge of the business being modeled by the software application. This research reports an experiment that applied combinatorial testing to the ElectronicRegistration program of the Omdurman IslamicUniversity usingPictMaster tool. This tool can first accept a predefined test suite, then generate additional test cases to achieve the required coverage while minimizing redundant coverage of interactions.

The experimental results showed that combinatorial testing detected hardto find software faults with a small number of tests.