Identifying Failure-Inducing Combinations Using Tuple Relationship

Combinatorial testing (CT) aims at detecting interaction failures between parameters in a system. Identifying the failure-inducing combinations of a failing test configuration can help developers find the cause of this failure. However, most studies in CT focus on detecting the failures rather than identifying failure-inducing combinations. In this paper, we propose the notion of a tuple relationship tree (TRT) to describe the relationships among all the candidate parameter interactions. TRT reduces additional test configurations that need to be generated in the fault localization process, and it also provides a clear view of all possible candidate interactions. As a result, our approach will not omit any possible interaction that could be the cause of a failure. In particular, we can identify multiple failure-inducing combinations that overlap with each other. Moreover, we extend our approach to handle the case where additional failure-inducing combinations may be introduced by newly generated test configurations.