Abstract
Verification and validation of highly-configurable software systems, such as those supporting many optional or customizable
features, is a challenging activity. In fact, due to its intrinsic complexity, formal modeling of the whole system may require
a great effort. Modeling activities may become extremely expensive and time consuming, and the tester may decide to model
(at least initially) only the inputs and require they are sufficiently covered by tests. The recent wide spreading usage of
combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) is dramatically improving the effectiveness of this activity. Although there exist
analytical ways to derive minimal sized CIT test suites, they are not applicable to all task sizes. Therefore, researchers
have explored many techniques based on greedy or heuristic algorithms that may lead to sub-optimal result in the size of the
built test suite but that are applicable to problems of real size. In this paper, a new \it parameter-based heuristic algorithm
for the construction of pairwise covering test suites is presented; it is based on a symmetry property of covering arrays
and it is called \IPOS. Time and space complexity of \IPOS is discussed in comparison especially with the only other parameter-based
approach existing in literature. The proposed approach is supported by a prototype implementation, and experimental assessment
is also presented.
[read the copyright and download the pdf file] [DOI]