Combinatorial test design in practice

Combinatorial testing is a specification based sampling technique that provides a systematic way to select combinations of program inputs or features for testing. It has been applied over the years to test input data, configurations, web forms, protocols, graphical user interfaces and for testing software product lines. This tutorial introduces the fundamentals of combinatorial testing, including both practical and theoretical foundations, to provide a comprehensive introduction that is relevant to both test practitioners and software engineering researchers. The tutorial will present an overview of Combinatorial Test Design (CTD) and describe some state of the art research advances and domains where CTD has been applied. It will present the theoretical underpinnings of CTD and explain a few algorithmic techniques used to generate CTD samples, as well as describe recent work on practical extensions to these algorithms that allow for a broader use of CTD. A session devoted to modeling test problems using CTD will follow, with attendees obtaining hands-on experience using several realistic problems.