Extended Combination Testing: Generates Array Test Suite

Abstract

Traditional testing methods tend to generate test suite for programs of which parameters are basic data types, e.g. integer, real or Boolean. However, there are lots of programs with inputs of complex data types, e.g. array, point or structure, traditional testing methods can’t deal with them. This paper focuses on testing programs with array parameter that is widely used in programming. The difficulties to generate array test suite lie in two reasons. The first reason is that array is composed by several ordered, interactional elements. Thus, we cannot take the array as several independent, isolated elements when generating array test suite. The second one is that we should consider the implicative attributes of array effecting the generation of test suite, e.g. the size of array, or some special elements in array. This paper proposes a new testing method, Extended Combination Testing (ECT), to generate array test suite systemically. Through based on traditional combination testing, ECT extends its application scope form basic data test suite generation to array test suite generation. ECT proceeds in three steps: (1) yield values of other non-array parameters and spawn them to a proper combination; (2) identify the implicative attributes of array; (3) choose values for each array elements, and combine values of array elements with proper combination coverage into test suite. While in traditional combination test, only step (3) is included. The results of our experiment validate the effectiveness of ECT in generating array test suite.