Prioritized interaction testing for pair-wise coverage with seeding and constraints

Interaction testing is widely used in screening for faults. In software testing, it provides a natural mechanism for testing systems to be deployed on a variety of hardware and software configurations. In many applications where interaction testing is needed, the entire test suite is not run as a result of time or budget constraints. In these situations, it is essential to prioritize the tests. Here, we adapt a "one-test-at-a-time" greedy method to take importance of pairs into account. The method can be used to generate a set of tests in order, so that when run to completion all pair-wise interactions are tested, but when terminated after any intermediate number of tests, those deemed most important are tested. In addition, practical concerns of seeding and avoids are addressed. Computational results are reported. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.