Application of quotient space theory in input-output relationship based combinatorial testing

Abstract

The input-output relationship based combinatorial testing strategy considers the interactions of factors and generates test suite to cover them rather than to cover all t-way interactions. It is a very effective combinatorial testing method. However in some cases, for its characteristic of black-box testing, the identified input-output relationships may actually be inexistent or incomplete and the range of faults diagnosis is wide. To address these issues, we apply the quotient space theory in input-output combinatorial testing and extend the model of the traditional strategy to be used for gray-box testing by identifying the input-output relationships of different granules of program and constructing the test suite for each granule. In the end of the paper, we have evaluated the strategy using a case study, which indicates the effectiveness of it. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.