Towards incremental adaptive covering arrays

The increasing complexity of configurable software systems creates a need for more intelligent sampling mechanisms to detect and locate failure-inducing dependencies between configurations. Prior work shows that test schedules based on a mathematical object, called a covering array, can be used to detect and locate failures in combination with a classification tree analysis. This paper addresses limitations of the earlier approach. First, the previous work requires developers to choose the covering array's strength, even though there is no scientific or historical basis for doing so. Second, if a single covering array is insufficient to classify specific failures, the entire process must be rerun from scratch. To address these issues, our new approach incrementally and adaptively builds covering array schedules. It begins with a low strength, and continually increases this as resources allow, or poor classification results require. At each stage, previous tests are reused. This a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Adam A. Porter, Myra B. Cohen, Sandro Fouché
• Keywords: Array Schedules, Multiple Covering Arrays, SIGSOFT 2007, Single Covering Array, Software Engineering