Abstract
Combinatorial testing (CT) is an important black-box testing method. In CT, the behavior of the system under test (SUT) is affected by several parameters/components. Then CT generates a combinatorial test suite. After the user executes a test suite and starts debugging, some test cases fail and some pass. From the perspective of a black box, the failures are caused by interaction of several parameters. It will be helpful if we can identify a small set of interacting parameters that caused the failures. This paper proposes a new automatic approach to identifying faulty interactions. It uses (pseudo-Boolean) constraint solving and optimization techniques to analyze the execution results of the combinatorial test suite. Experimental results show that the method is quite efficient and it can find faulty combinatorial interactions quickly. They also shed some light on the relation between the size of test suite and the ability of fault localization.
Supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grants No. 61070039 and No. 61100064.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Cohen, D.M., Dalal, S.R., Fredman, M.L., Patton, G.C.: The AETG system: An approach to testing based on combinatorial design. IEEE Trans. on Softw. Eng. 23(7), 437–444 (1997)
Colbourn, C., McClary, D.: Locating and detecting arrays for interaction faults. J. of Combinatorial Optimization 15(1), 17–48 (2011)
Czerwonka, J.: Pairwise testing in realworld: Practical extensions to test case generator. In: Proc. PNSQC 2006, pp. 419–430 (2006)
Gebser, M., Kaufmann, B., Neumann, A., Schaub, T.: Conflict-driven answer set solving. In: Proc. IJCAI 2007, pp. 386–392 (2007), http://www.cs.uni-potsdam.de/clasp/
Ghandehari, L.S.G., Lei, Y., Xie, T., Kuhn, D.R., Kacker, R.: Identifying failure-inducing combinations in a combinatorial test set. In: Proc. ICST 2012, pp. 370–379 (2012)
Kuhn, D.R., Okun, V.: Pseudo-exhaustive testing for software. In: Proc. SEW 2006, pp. 153–158 (2006)
Kuhn, D.R., Wallace, D.R., Gallo, A.M.: Software fault interactions and implications for software testing. IEEE Trans. on Softw. Eng. 30(6), 418–421 (2004)
Martínez, C., Moura, L., Panario, D., Stevens, B.: Algorithms to Locate Errors Using Covering Arrays. In: Laber, E.S., Bornstein, C., Nogueira, L.T., Faria, L. (eds.) LATIN 2008. LNCS, vol. 4957, pp. 504–519. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Nie, C., Leung, H.: A survey of combinatorial testing. ACM Computing Surveys 43(2) (2011)
Shi, L., Nie, C., Xu, B.: A Software Debugging Method Based on Pairwise Testing. In: Sunderam, V.S., van Albada, G.D., Sloot, P.M.A., Dongarra, J. (eds.) ICCS 2005, Part III. LNCS, vol. 3516, pp. 1088–1091. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Wang, Z., Xu, B., Chen, L., Xu, L.: Adaptive interaction fault location based on combinatorial testing. In: Proc. QSIC 2010, pp. 495–502 (2010)
Yilmaz, C., Cohen, M.B., Porter, A.A.: Covering arrays for efficient fault characterization in complex configuration spaces. IEEE Trans. on Softw. Eng. 32(1), 20–34 (2006)
Zeller, A., Hildebrandt, R.: Simplifying and isolating failure-inducing input. IEEE Trans. on Soft. Eng., 183–200 (2002)
Zhang, Z., Zhang, J.: Characterizing failure-causing parameter interactions by adaptive testing. In: Proc. ISSTA 2011, pp. 331–341 (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhang, J., Ma, F., Zhang, Z. (2012). Faulty Interaction Identification via Constraint Solving and Optimization. In: Cimatti, A., Sebastiani, R. (eds) Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing – SAT 2012. SAT 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7317. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31612-8_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31612-8_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31611-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31612-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)