On the Completion of Partial Combinatorial Test Suites

Abstract Combinatorial Interaction Testing is a widely used method for testing intricate systems. In most cases, the test suites are generated from scratch. However, there are cases when testers may want to reuse existing tests, in order to include them in a new test suite, both for enhancing the performance of the generation process or because those tests are valuable for checking the functioning of the system under test in critical conditions. In this paper, we propose a general framework for dealing with existing test suites using combinatorial test generators. We also discuss the definition of partial tests and test suites, and the scenarios in which partial tests should or could be reused. Finally, we compare the most common tools for completing test suites, namely ACTS, PICT, and pMEDICI+, using different incompleteness levels in the seeds. ACTS with seeds generally performed the best in terms of test suite size and generation time. The other two tools, namely PICT and pMEDICI+, were slower and produced larger test suites on average. We have found that using seeds could sometimes come with a cost, especially in the scenario where test cases are partial and completing them is not always cost-effective in terms of generation time. The choice of re-using or throwing away existing tests must be based on use case-specific requirements. We do not recommend using seeds when they are composed of partial test cases, providing that they are not required for some other reason. On the contrary, we envision the use of partial test suites when a test suite with higher strength is needed.