A Hybrid Artificial Bee Colony and Harmony Search Algorithm to Generate Covering Arrays for Pair-wise Testing

Combinatorial Interaction Testing (CIT) is a cost effective testing technique that aims to detect interaction faults generated as a result of interaction between components or parameters in a software system. CIT requires the generation of effective test sets that cover all possible t-way (t denotes the strength of testing) interactions between parameters. Covering array (CA) and mixed covering array (MCA) are often used to represent test sets. This paper presents a hybrid algorithm that integrates artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) and harmony search algorithm (HS) to construct CAs for testing all 2-way interactions (pair-wise testing) in software systems. The performance of the proposed hybrid algorithm ABCHS-CAG is compared and analyzed by performing experiments on a set of benchmark problems on pair-wise testing. The results show that ABCHS-CAG generates smaller CAs than its greedy counterparts whereas its performance is comparable to the existing state-of-the-art meta-heuristic algorithms.