Interaction Testing: From Pairwise to Variable Strength Interaction

Although desirable as an important activity for quality assurances and enhancing reliability, complete and exhaustive software testing is prohibitively impossible due to resources as well as timing constraints. While earlier work has indicated that uniform pairwise testing (i.e. based on 2-way interaction of variables) can be effective to detect most faults in a typical software system, a counter argument suggests such conclusion cannot be generalized to all software system faults. In some system, faults may also be non-uniform and caused by more than two parameters. Considering these issues, this paper explores the issues pertaining to t-way testing from pairwise to variable strength interaction in order to highlight the state-of-the-art as well as the current state-of-practice.