A statistical assessment of some software testing strategies and application of experimental design techniques

Abstract

An important problem in software testing is the efficient generation of test cases. Two classes of strategies, random and partition testing, have been dis- cussed extensively in the software testing literature. In this paper, we provide a systematic statistical comparison of these two classes of strategies and demonstrate the usefulness of partition testing. We also show that some of the previous con- clusions in the software testing literature about the inefficiency of partition testing are incorrect. The applicability of experimental design methods for partition test- ing is also discussed. A real application is used to illustrate the various concepts and to demonstrate the usefulness of experimental design methods for generating partitions.