A Parallel Tree Based Strategy for 3-way Interaction Testing

Software testing is one of the most important phases of the software development life cycle. However, software testing is traditionally seen as a difficult and time consuming activity that is hard to embed in the software development process. Software and hardware testers concentrate on how to minimize the testing time, as well as ensure that the system is also tested well and made acceptable. Basic combinatorial interaction (i.e. pairwise or 2-way) testing has been one of the commonly used methods in achieving the above goal with 50-97 percent of errors detection. However, empirical evidence has proved that the 2-way interaction testing is a poor strategy for testing highly interactive systems. Therefore there is a need for going beyond pairwise testing to uncover these errors. To speed up the process of solving problems, researchers have applied parallel algorithms to various large computationally expensive optimization problems and have succeeded in solving these problems in an acceptable time. Therefore, in this paper we have enhanced our previous strategy “A tree based strategy for test data generation and cost calculation for pairwise combinatorial interaction testing” to work effectively in parallel and to support a 3-way interaction testing. The correctness of the strategy has been proved, and the performance evaluation shows the efficient of the strategy in reducing test size.