IPOG: A General Strategy for T-Way Software Testing

TLDR

Existing t‑way testing research focuses on pairwise interactions, but faults can also arise from higher‑order parameter interactions. The paper generalizes the in‑parameter‑order (IPO) strategy from pairwise to t‑way testing. The authors implement the generalized IPO strategy in a tool named FireEye, addressing combinatorial explosion through design choices that enable efficient execution. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FireEye in t‑way testing.

Abstract

Most existing work on t-way testing has focused on 2-way (or pairwise) testing, which aims to detect faults caused by interactions between any two parameters. However, faults can also be caused by interactions involving more than two parameters. In this paper, we generalize an existing strategy, called in-parameter-order (IPO), from pairwise testing to t-way testing. A major challenge of our generalization effort is dealing with the combinatorial growth in the number of combinations of parameter values. We describe a t-way testing tool, called FireEye, and discuss design decisions that are made to enable an efficient implementation of the generalized IPO strategy. We also report several experiments that are designed to evaluate the effectiveness of FireEye