Survey of Covering Arrays

Abstract

Covering Arrays(CA) are combinatorial objects that have been used succesfully to automate the generation of test cases for software testing. The CAs have the features of being of minimal cardinality (i.e. minimize the number of test cases), and maximum coverage (i.e. they guarantee to cover all combinations of certain size between the input parameters). Only in few cases there is known an optimal solution to construct CAs, but in general the problem of constructing optimal CAs is a hard combinatorial optimization problem. For this reason, a number of methods to solve the construction of covering arrays have been developed. This paper gives a survey of the state of the art of the methods to construct covering arrays. The methods analyzed were grouped in four categories: exact methods (Section II), greedy methods (Section III), metaheuristic methods (Section IV), and algebraic methods (Section V). The paper ends with a summary of the methods analyzed.