Building Prioritized Pairwise Interaction Test Suites with Ant Colony Optimization

Abstract

Interaction testing offers a stable cost-benefit ratio in identifying faults. But in many testing scenarios, the entire test suite cannot be fully executed due to limited time or cost. In these situations, it is essential to take the importance of interactions into account and prioritize these tests. To tackle this issue, the biased covering array is proposed and the Weighted Density Algorithm (WDA) is developed. To find a better solution, in this paper we adopt ant colony optimization (ACO) to build this prioritized pairwise interaction test suite (PITS). In our research, we propose four concrete test generation algorithms based on Ant System, Ant System with Elitist, Ant Colony System and Max-Min Ant System respectively. We also implement these algorithms and apply them to two typical inputs and report experimental results. The results show the effectiveness of these algorithms.