Towards Automatic Constraints Elicitation in Pair-Wise Testing Based on a Linguistic Approach: Elicitation Support Using Coupling Strength

This paper focuses on the constraints elicitation in the combinatorial test design. Pair-wise testing, a common combinatorial testing approach, is an effective test planning technique to find interaction faults from the relatively small set of test cases. The test space is modeled by a set of parameters, their individual values, and constraints on the value combinations. Constraints reduce the test space, however, little consideration has been given to the process of finding them. The goal of our study is to establish an automatic constraints acquisition from the requirements document. We try to establish a constraints elicitation mechanism that helps to extract constraints from the requirements document based on a linguistic approach. In this paper, as the first step, we attempt to extract the coupling strength between parameters from the requirements document. We conducted a preliminary experiment on an ATM system example and evaluated the feasibility of our approach.