PWTool, A novel automated tool for pairwise testing

In the current culture of software development, every software development group consists of a dedicated software testing team whose main objective is to deliver bug-free products to the clients. No matter how hard the test engineers strive to catch all the defects before the product is released, they always creep in and often reappear even with the best manual testing processes. Because of this, savvy test managers have realised that automated testing is an essential component of successful development projects since once automated tests are created, they can easily be repeated and extended to perform tasks that would have been impossible or too time-consuming with manual testing. This paper investigates the suitability of pair-wise testing in automated testing and demonstrates how the In-Parameter Order (IPO) algorithm used in the generation of pair-wise combinations can be optimised. PWTool, a novel web-based application for generating pair-wise test cases mainly for online systems is introduced.