You are required to read and agree to the below before accessing a full-text version of an article in the IDE article repository.

The full-text document you are about to access is subject to national and international copyright laws. In most cases (but not necessarily all) the consequence is that personal use is allowed given that the copyright owner is duly acknowledged and respected. All other use (typically) require an explicit permission (often in writing) by the copyright owner.

For the reports in this repository we specifically note that

  • the use of articles under IEEE copyright is governed by the IEEE copyright policy (available at http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/rights/copyrightpolicy.html)
  • the use of articles under ACM copyright is governed by the ACM copyright policy (available at http://www.acm.org/pubs/copyright_policy/)
  • technical reports and other articles issued by M‰lardalen University is free for personal use. For other use, the explicit consent of the authors is required
  • in other cases, please contact the copyright owner for detailed information

By accepting I agree to acknowledge and respect the rights of the copyright owner of the document I am about to access.

If you are in doubt, feel free to contact webmaster@ide.mdh.se

Can Pairwise Testing Perform Comparably to Manually Handcrafted Testing Carried Out by Industrial Engineers?

Fulltext:


Authors:

Peter Charbachi, Linus Eklund , Eduard Paul Enoiu

Research group:

Software Testing Laboratory

Publication Type:

Conference/Workshop Paper

Venue:

International Workshop on Combinatorial Testing and its Applications

Abstract

Testing is an important activity in engineering of industrial software. For such software, testing is usually performed manually by handcrafting tests based on specific design techniques and domain-specific experience. To support developers in testing, different approaches for producing good test cases have been proposed. In the last couple of years combinatorial testing has been explored with the goal of automatically combining the input values of the software based on a certain strategy. Pairwise testing is a combinatorial technique used to generate tests by varying the values of each pair of input parameters to a system until all possible combinations of those parameters are created. There is some evidence suggesting that these kinds of techniques are efficient and relatively good at detecting software faults. Unfortunately, there is little experimental evidence on the comparison of these combinatorial testing techniques with, what is perceived as, rigorous manually handcrafted testing. In this study we compare pairwise tests with tests created manually by engineers for 45 industrial programs. The tests were evaluated in terms of fault detection, code coverage and number of tests. The results of this study show that pairwise testing, while useful for achieving high code coverage and fault detection for the majority of the programs, is not quite as effective in terms of fault detection as manual testing. The results also suggest that pairwise testing is just as good as manual testing at fault detection for 64% of the programs.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Charbachi4752,
author = {Peter Charbachi and Linus Eklund and Eduard Paul Enoiu},
title = {Can Pairwise Testing Perform Comparably to Manually Handcrafted Testing Carried Out by Industrial Engineers?},
month = {July},
year = {2017},
booktitle = {International Workshop on Combinatorial Testing and its Applications},
url = {http://www.es.mdu.se/publications/4752-}
}