Combinatorial Software Testing

Published

August 7, 2009

Author(s)

David R. Kuhn, Raghu N. Kacker, Yu Lei, Justin Hunter

Abstract

Developers of large data-intensive software often notice an interesting - though not surprising - phenomenon: when usage of an application jumps dramatically, components that have operated for months without trouble suddenly develop previously undetected errors. For example, newly added customers may have account records with an oddball combination of values that have not been seen before. Some of these rare combinations trigger faults that have escaped previous testing and extensive use. Or, the application may have been installed on a different OS-hardware-DBMS-networking platform. Combinatorial testing, which exercises all t-way combinations up to a pre-specified level of t, can help find problems like this early in the testing life-cycle.

Citation

Computer (IEEE Computer)

Volume

42

Issue

8

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2009.253

Keywords

combinatorial software testing, design and test, efficient test design methods, pairwise testing, software technologies

Citation

Kuhn, D. , Kacker, R. , Lei, Y. and Hunter, J. (2009), Combinatorial Software Testing, Computer (IEEE Computer), [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2009.253 (Accessed October 22, 2025)