An evaluation of combination strategies for test case selection

This paper presents results from a comparative evaluation of five combination strategies. Combination strategies are test case selection methods that combine "interesting" values of the input parameters of a test subject to form test cases. This research comparatively evaluated five combination strategies; the All Combination strategy (AC), the Each Choice strategy (EC), the Base Choice strategy (BC), Orthogonal Arrays (OA) and the algorithm from the Automatic Efficient Test Generator (AETG). AC satisfies n-wise coverage, EC and BC satisfy 1-wise coverage, and OA and AETG satisfy pair-wise coverage. The All Combinations strategy was used as a "gold standard" strategy; it subsumes the others but is usually too expensive for practical use. The others were used in an experiment that used five programs seeded with 128 faults. The combination strategies were evaluated with respect to the number of test cases, the number of faults found, failure size, and number of decis...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: ESE
• Authors: Mats Grindal, Birgitta Lindström, Jeff Offutt, Sten F. Andler
• Keywords: Base Choice Strategy, Choice Strategy, Combination Strategies, Database, ESE 2006