Hints in Unified Combinatorial Interaction Testing

Unified Combinatorial Interaction Testing (U-CIT) aims to improve the applicability of the CIT approaches in practice by unifying the way the requested CIT objects are computed. Consequently, improving the efficiency of the U-CIT constructors is of practical importance. In this paper, we introduce the concept of hints, which represent symbolically interpreted domain knowledge to reduce the number of times the underlying constraint solver is called during the construction of a CIT object. The results of our empirical studies conducted on real software systems demonstrate that the proposed approach can profoundly reduce the construction times.