Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Pairwise Test Generation

Our dependence on software applications has become dramatic in many activities of our daily life as they help to increase the efficiency of our tasks. These software applications have many sets of input values, parameters, software/hardware environments and system conditions, which need to be tested to ensure software reliability and quality. However, the whole comprehensive software testing is virtually not possible due to marketing pressure and resource constraints. In an attempt to solve this problem, there has been a development of a number of sampling and pairwise strategies in the literature. In this paper, we evaluated and proposed a pairwise strategy named Pairwise Artificial Bee Colony algorithm (PABC). According to the benchmarking results, the PABC strategies outdo some existing strategies to generate a test case in many of the system configurations taken into consideration. In a case where PABC is not at its optimal stage or its best performance, the experiments of a test case are effectively competitive. PABC progresses as a means to achieve the effective use of the artificial bee colony algorithm for pairwise testing reduction

An orchestrated survey of available algorithms and tools for Combinatorial Testing

For functional testing based on the input domain of a functionality, parameters and their values are identified and a test suite is generated using a criterion exercising combinations of those parameters and values. Since software systems are large, resulting in large numbers of parameters and values, a technique based on combinatorics called Combinatorial Testing (CT) is used to automate the process of creating those combinations. CT is typically performed with the help of combinatorial objects called Covering Arrays. The goal of the present work is to determine available algorithms/tools for generating a combinatorial test suite. We tried to be as complete as possible by using a precise protocol for selecting papers describing those algorithms/tools. The 75 algorithms/tools we identified are then categorized on the basis of different comparison criteria, including: the test suite generation technique, the support for selection (combination) criteria, mixed covering array, the strength of coverage, and the support for constraints between parameters. Results can be of interest to researchers or software companies who are looking for a CT algorithm/tool suitable for their needs

Feedback driven adaptive combinatorial testing

The configuration spaces of modern software systems are too large to test exhaustively. Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) approaches, such as covering arrays, systematically sample the configuration space and test only the selected configurations. The basic justification for CIT approaches is that they can cost-effectively exercise all system behaviors caused by the settings of t or fewer options. We conjecture, however, that in practice many such behaviors are not actually tested because of masking effects – failures that perturb execution so as to prevent some behaviors from being exercised. In this work we present a feedback-driven, adaptive, combinatorial testing approach aimed at detecting and working around masking effects. At each iteration we detect potential masking effects, isolate their likely causes, and then generate new covering arrays that allow previously masked combinations to be tested in the subsequent iteration. We empirically assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach on two large widely-used open source software systems. Our results suggest that masking effects do exist and that our approach provides a promising and effcient way to work around them