Adaptive Interaction Fault Location Based on Combinatorial Testing

Combinatorial testing aims to detect interaction faults, which are triggered by interaction among parameters in system, by covering some specific combinations of parametric values. Most works about combinatorial testing focus on detecting such interaction faults rather than locating them. Based on the model of interaction fault schema, in which the interaction fault is described as a minimum fault schema and several corresponding parent-schemas, we propose an iterative adaptive interaction fault location technique for combinatorial testing. In order to locate interaction faults that detected in combinatorial testing, such technique utilizes delta debugging strategy to filtrate suspicious schemas by generating and running additional test cases iteratively. The properties, which include both recall and precision, of adaptive interaction fault location techniques are also analyzed in this paper. Analytical results suggest that the high scores in both recall and precision are guaranteed. It means that such technique can provide an efficient guidance for the applications of combinatorial testing.