Firefly combinatorial testing strategy

Abstract

Firefly Algorithm (FA) has been applied to solve many of the optimisation problems. One of the optimisation problems is combinatorial optimisation. This paper proposes FA to be applied for solving combinatorial testing problem by implementing a Firefly Algorithm based Test Suite Generator (FATG). Combinatorial testing is an effective approach to generate a test suite to detect the defects may introduce due to the interaction between the system’s interfaces. However, the interactions between the system’s interfaces are very complex and very huge. Therefore, it is impractical to test all the interfaces’ interactions due to the time constraints. Based on that, there is a need to produce minimum efficient test suite that addresses the required combination degree. By doing so, it can help to save a time of test execution to detect the defects. Based on the comparative evaluation with existing optimisation based combinatorial testing strategies, the results show FATG able to work effectively by generating a nearly optimum result of a few seconds.