Anatomy of the Tree Based Strategy for High Strength Interaction Testing

The amount of resources consumed for a complete and exhaustive testing becomes unreasonable and unaffordable. While it is vital to assure the quality and the reliability of any system, it is impossible to do an exhaustive testing due to the huge number of possible combinations. To bring a balance between exhaustive testing and lack of testing combinatorial interactions testing has been adopted. Although it is stated in literature that a complete pairwise interaction testing ensures the detection of 50-97 percent of faults, it is not sufficient to stop with pairwise testing alone for highly interactive systems. Therefore, there is a need to extend the level of testing for a general multi way combinatorial interactions testing. This paper enhanced the previous strategies "A tree based strategy for test data generation and cost calculation" and "3-way interaction testing using the tree strategy" to support a general multi-way combinatorial interaction testing involving uniform and non uniform parametric values. In this strategy, two algorithms have been adopted; a tree construction algorithm which constructs the possible test cases and an iterative cost calculation algorithm that constructs efficient multi- way test suites which cover all parameter interactions between input components. Both algorithms are presented in details.