Construction of Variable Strength Covering Array for Combinatorial Testing Using a Greedy Approach to Genetic Algorithm

The limitation of time and budget usually prohibits exhaustive testing of interactions between components in a component based software system. Combinatorial testing is a software testing technique that can be used to detect faults in a component based software system caused by the interactions of components in an effective and efficient way. Most of the research in the field of combinatorial testing till now has focused on the construction of optimal covering array (CA) of fixed strength t which covers all t-way interactions among components. The size of CA increases with the increase in strength of testing t, which further increases the cost of testing. However, not all components require higher strength interaction testing. Hence, in a system with k components a technique is required to construct CA of fixed strength t which covers all t-way interactions among k components and all ti-way (where ti > t) interactions between a subset of k components. This is achieved using the variable strength covering array (VSCA). In this paper we propose a greedy based genetic algorithm (GA) to generate optimal VSCA. Experiments are conducted on several benchmark configurations to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.