Towards Automatic Constraint Elicitation in Test Design: Preliminary Evaluation Based on Collective Intelligence

Constraint elicitation is an important process in test design since constraints determine the test space, however, the constraint elicitation process, which is known as a daunting task, has not been well studied. It usually requires manual capturing and precise definition of constraints. In this paper, we try to automate a part of the constraint elicitation process in combinatorial test design. Pair-wise testing, a common combinatorial testing approach, is an effective test planning technique for finding interaction faults using a small set of test cases. We propose a collective intelligence approach to determining which value combinations are potential constraints. We conduct preliminary experiments on two examples, a traditional cross-browser testing example and an ATM system example, and evaluate the feasibility of our approach.