A Practical Approach to Combinatorial Test Design

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive, practical methodology for combinatorial test design, emphasizing modeling, constraints, coverage, and tooling to improve software testing efficiency and effectiveness.

Contribution

It offers detailed guidance on CTD modeling, constraints, coverage criteria, and tooling algorithms, enhancing practical application of combinatorial testing.

Findings

Effective reduction of testing space using CTD

Enhanced test quality and efficiency

Guidelines for modeling and tooling development

Abstract

Typical software has a huge input space. The number of inputs may be astronomical or even infinite. Thus, the task of validating that the software is correct seems hopeless. To deal with this difficult task, Combinatorial Test Design (CTD) can be used to provide reduction of the testing space and high quality and efficient testing. The application of CTD is largely determined by the quality of the CTD model. This book covers the CTD test design methodology and CTD modeling in details. It elaborates on the process of constraints definition. It also explains how to best define your coverage requirements to direct and focus your tests. It is hard to create good CTD models without a good grasp of the implementation of CTD tooling. To that hand, the book also takes a deeper dive into covering principles and algorithms needed to build CTD tooling. Hands on exercises are used throughout the text and help create a clear understanding of the concepts covered within this book.