Test set generation for pairwise testing using genetic algorithms

Abstract

In software systems, it has been observed that a fault is often caused by an interaction between a small number of input parameters. Even for moderately sized software systems, exhaustive testing is practically impossible to achieve. This is either due to time or cost constraints. Combinatorial (t-way) testing provides a technique to select a subset of exhaustive test cases covering all of the t-way interactions, without much of a loss to the fault detection capability. In this paper, an approach is proposed to generate 2-way (pairwise) test sets using genetic algorithms. The performance of the algorithm is improved by creating an initial solution using the overlap coefficient (a similarity matrix). Two mutation strategies have also been modified to improve their efficiency. Furthermore, the mutation operator is improved by using a combination of three mutation strategies. A comparative survey of the techniques to generate t-way test sets using genetic algorithms was also conducted. It has been shown experimentally that the proposed approach generates faster results by achieving higher percentage coverage in a fewer number of generations. Additionally, the size of the mixed covering arrays was reduced in one of the six benchmark problems examined.