Combinatorial Testing of ACTS: A Case Study

In this paper we present a case study of applying combinatorial testing to test a combinatorial test generation tool called ACTS. The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, we want to gain experience and insights about how to apply combinatorial testing in practice. Second, we want to evaluate the effectiveness of combinatorial testing applied to a real-life system. ACTS has 24637 lines of uncommented code, and provides a command line interface and a fairly sophisticated graphic user interface. The main challenge of this study was to model the input space in terms of a set of parameters and values. Once the model was designed, we generated test cases using ACTS, which were then later used to test ACTS. The results of this study show that input space modeling can be a significant undertaking, and needs to be carefully managed. The results also show that combinatorial testing is effective in terms of achieving high code coverage and fault detection.