Logging to facilitate combinatorial system testing

Abstract

Testing a web application is typically very complicated. Imposing simple coverage criteria such as function or line coverage is often not sufficient to uncover bugs due to incorrect components integration. Combinatorial testing can enforce a stronger criterion, while still allowing the prioritization of test cases in order to keep the overall effort feasible. Combinatorial testing requires the whole testing domain to be classified and formalized, e.g., in terms of classification trees. At the system testing level, these trees can be quite large. This short paper presents our preliminary work to automatically construct classification trees from loggings of the system, and to subsequently calculate the coverage of our test runs against various combinatorial criteria. We use the tool CTE which allows such criteria to be custom specified. Furthermore, it comes with a graphical interface to simplify the specification of new test sequences. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.