Incrementally Applicable t-Wise Combinatorial Test Suites for High-Strength Interaction Testing

In this paper we first show that the combinatorial task of enumerating t-wise tuples out of a given set of elements is the recursive iteration of the simpler task of computing pairs out of the same set of elements. We then show how to apply this result to the design of a general framework for incremental construction of a Combinatorial Interaction test suite, that is, producing at each iteration an additional set of tuples required to increase the coverage interaction degree just by one. As a last contribution, we show that in the presented construction framework, the covering array minimization problem and its inherent complexity can be encapsulated inside a delegate task of merging two given smaller covering array, while minimizing rows redundancy.