Efficient Combinatorial Test Generation Based on Multivalued Decision Diagrams

Abstract. Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) is an emerging test-ing technique that has proved to be effective in finding faults due to the interaction among inputs. Efficient test generation for CIT is still an open problem especially when applied to real models having meaningful size and containing many constraints among inputs. In this paper we present a novel technique for the automatic generation of compact test suites starting from models containing constraints given in general form. It is based on the use of Multivalued Decision Diagrams (MDDs) which prove to be suitable to efficiently support CIT. We devise and experiment several optimizations including a novel variation of the classical greedy policy normally used in similar algorithms. The results of a thorough comparison with other similar techniques are presented and show that our approach can provide several advantages in terms of applicability, test suite size, generation time, and cost.