Pairwise Testing in the Presence of Configuration Change Cost

Testing is an important but expensive part of software development. This paper discusses the minimization of testing cost in the presence of configuration change cost. By configuration change cost we mean the cost of configuration changes that occur in sequential testcase execution - the time and effort incurred in changing the configuration if the execution of two consecutive testcases requires different system configurations. To the best of our knowledge this problem has never been studied before. We tackle the problem in the context of pairwise testing, a well-known testing strategy for black box testing. This strategy requires that all possible pairs of input parameters be covered by at least one testcase. Extending a greedy algorithm, we develop two algorithms for constructing pairwise test suites of both small size and low configuration change cost.