Effectiveness of Pair-Wise Testing for Software with Boolean Inputs

The pair-wise approach is a software testing technique, which generates test cases that consist of all combinations of pairs of input variable values. This paper investigates the effectiveness of the pair-wise approach for one practically important case -- testing logical expressions in software. Pair-wise effectiveness is experimentally evaluated in general terms and separately for specific types of faults. Two freely available software tools are used for pair-wise test set generation. Fault Evaluator, a software tool developed by the authors, is used for fault simulation and effectiveness evaluation. The experimental results are contrasted with data from other researchers, and the effectiveness of the pair-wise approach is compared with random testing. Quantitative analysis of pair-wise effectiveness depending on the size of expressions is also provided.