Application of combinatorial testing techniques in complex event processing engines

Testing practice has a critical place during the design, implementation and integration of software, hardware and complex systems composed of these. Cost of failures caused by bugs that could not be detected and fixed early in the process increase in a multiplicative way and adversely affect the overall projects costs. However, trying to do comprehensive tests generating correct outputs is also costly both time-wise and money-wise. Combinatorial Testing Techniques (CTT) have been a preferred method in software testing due to their quantifiable case coverage guarantees and appropriateness for automation. We observed that, Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines - commonly used today for real-time analysis over critical, high-volume signal processing applications (e.g. mobile communication, sensors, radar) - are NOT being systematically tested with approaches such as CTT. In this paper, we uniquely show applicability of CTT to CEP for fast creation of continuous query test suites and obtain promising results.