CIT-daily: A combinatorial interaction testing-based daily build process

Abstract

In this work, we introduce an approach, called CIT-daily, which integrates combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) with the daily build processes to systematically test the interactions between the factors/parameters affecting the system’s behaviors, on a daily basis. We also develop a number of CIT-daily strategies and empirically evaluate them on highly-configurable systems. The first strategy tests the same t-way covering array every day throughout the process, achieving a t-way coverage on a daily basis by covering each possible combination of option settings for every combination of t options. The other strategies, on the other hand, while guaranteeing a t-way coverage on a daily basis, aim to cover higher order interactions between the configuration options over time by varying the t-way covering arrays tested. In the experiments, we observed that the proposed approach significantly improved the effectiveness (i.e., fault revealing abilities) of the daily build processes; randomizing the coverage of higher order interactions between the configuration options while guaranteeing a base t-way coverage every day, further improved the effectiveness; and the more the higher order interactions covered during the process, the higher the fault revealing abilities tended to be.