The RATG System: Reducing Time with an Approach of Testing based on Combinatorial Design Method

D.V. Gopala Raju, K.V.S.V.N. Raju, and A. Damodaram (India)

Keywords

Pair-wise combinations, Fields, Relations, Degree ofinteraction, seed, constraint, Reliable Automatic TestCase Generator (RATG), Combinatorial Design Method(CDM) .

Abstract

Testers face the challenge of doing testing within the constrained schedule. In the hyper competitive commercial market place, it is not practical to exhaustively test all combinations of system testcases. The number of ways a system must be tested can often be overwhelming. There are a number of automatic test case generation tools available but these can suffer from combinatorial explosions in the number of possibilities to test. This paper discusses the method that generates a small subset of test cases, which provides good coverage of the test domain - the Combinatorial Design Method. This approach to testing that uses combinatorial designs to generate tests that cover the pair-wise, triple or n-way combinations of a system's test parameters. Although this paper focuses on pair-wise coverage, the discussion is equally valid when higher coverage criteria such as three way (triples) are used. These parameters determine the system's test scenarios. We implemented this new method in the Reliable Automatic TestCase Generation (RATG) system. The RATG system is used in a variety of applications for unit, system, and interoperability testing. It has generated both high-level test plans and detailed testcases. In several applications, it greatly reduced the cost and schedule of test plan development.

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