Proportional sampling strategy: Guidelines for software testing practitioners

Recently, several sufficient conditions have been developed that guarantee partition testing to have a higher probability of detecting at least one failure than random testing. One of these conditions is that the number of test cases selected from each partition is proportional to the size of the partition. We call such a method of allocating test cases the proportional sampling strategy. Although this condition is not the most general one, it is the most easily and practically applicable one. In this paper, we discuss how the proportional sampling strategy can be applied effectively in practice. Some practical issues that need to be attended are identified and guidelines to deal with these issues are suggested.