Design of a new t-way strategy for test case generation supporting sequence-less and sequence input interaction

Abstract

The t-way strategy is a successful and efficient combinatorial input interaction test (CIIT) case generator. In CIIT, the interactions may occur either between input parameter values (sequence-less input interaction) or between sequences of input parameters (sequence input interaction). Many useful t-way strategies have been developed in the last twenty years. Much of existing works on t-way strategy has considered either sequence-less (HHH, HSS, CSS, PSTG, SA, GA, ACA, BTS, LAHC, GA-N, IPO-N, AETG, mAETG, IPOG, MIPOG, ITCH, TVG, GTWay, Density, ParaOrder, PICT, TIITG, etc.) or sequence (BA, Kuhn encoding, ASP with Clasp, CP with Sugar, ER, TA, BR, etc.) input interaction. In many testing scenario, there is sometimes a need testing for both sequenceless and sequence operations within the same software under test (SUT). If t-way strategy is going to be pervasively made available, an integrated strategy is much sought after as it relieves the test engineers from the burden of learning another testing tool. In addition, as the generation of t-way test suite (for both sequence-less and sequence input interaction), it is an NP-hard problem, no single strategy challenges to generate minimum number of test cases for every system configuration. Addressing the aforementioned issues, this work proposes a new integrated strategy supporting sequence-less and sequence input interactions, named as, t-way input interaction test (TWIIT) strategy.