Ant colony algorithm to generate t-way test suite with constraints

Abstract

T-way testing is one of the testing techniques offered to generate test suites. It focuses on interactions of input parameters based on strength. Besides that, t-way is used to overcome exhaustive testing problem. Another important aspect in t-way is constraints. It forbids certain interactions of input parameters. Therefore, the final test suite contains only valid interactions. T-way testing is NP-hard problem. No single strategy can always generates the best test suite size at all time for all configurations. Thus, Const-TTSGA strategy has been developed to generate test suites. The strategy supports constraints variable strength. Const-TTSGA is a metaheuristic strategy which applies ant colony algorithm to generate the best test cases. Two types of experiments have been conducted; constraints uniform and variable strength which consists of few other configurations. Results obtained are compared to benchmarked results. Const-TTSGA outperformed other strategy for costraints uniform strength experiments except for one configuration. However, the strategy outperformed other strategies for constraints variable strength experiments.