Adaptive random prioritization for interaction test suites

Abstract

Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT), a black-box testing method, has been well studied in recent years. It aims at constructing an effective interaction test suites, so as to identify the faults that are caused by interactions among parameters. After interaction test suites are generated by CIT, the execution order of test cases in the test suite becomes critical due to limited testing resources. To determine test case order, the prioritization of interaction test suites has been employed. As we know, random prioritization (RP) of test cases has been considered as simple but ineffective. Existing research unveils that adaptive random prioritization (ARP) of test cases is an alternative and promising candidate that may replace RP. However, previous ARP techniques may not be used to prioritize interaction test suites due to the lack of source-code-related information in interaction test suite, such as statement coverage, function coverage, or branch coverage. In this paper, we not only propose the ARP strategy in order to prioritize interaction test suites by using interaction coverage information, without the source-code-related information, but also unify the RP strategy and traditional interaction-coverage based prioritization strategy (ICBP). Additionally, simulation studies indicate that the ARP strategy performs better than the RP strategy, test-case-generation prioritization, and reverse test-case-generation prioritization, and can also be more time-saving than ICBP while greatly maintaining similar, or even better, effectiveness.