Tools and Benchmarks - Automatic Generation of Combinatorial Test Data - page 76

Chapter 7
Tools and Benchmarks

Abstract This chapter lists some test generation tools (mostly, tools for finding
covering arrays). The chapter also gives some pointers to benchmarks, so that the
reader can evaluate and select tools.

7.1 Test Input Generation Tools

During the past twenty years or so, many automatic tools have been developed, which
can help us design combinatorial test suites. Some of the tools have been mentioned
in the previous chapters of this topic.

In this section, we briefly describe some of the automatic test generation tools for
combinatorial testing.

Jacek Czerwonka maintains a list of tools for combinatorial testing (in particular,
pairwise testing). See http://www.pairwise.org/ . Some of the tools are commercial;
some are free.

• ACTS ( http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/acts/index.html ) [ 15 ] is a powerful com-

binatorial test generation tool developed by Rick Kuhn and Raghu Kacker (US
National Institute of Standards and Technology), Jeff Yu Lei (University of Texas
at Arlington), and others. It implements the IPO algorithms (including IPOG,
IPOG-D, IPOG-F, IPOG-F2), as described in Chap. 4 . ACTS can be used to gen-
erate t -way test suites (1 6). It can construct mixed strength CAs, and it

allows the user to specify constraints.

≤ t ≤

• AETG is one of the first test data generation systems for combinatorial testing.

Its main algorithm has been described previously, in Chap. 3 . The system is now
available as a web service ( http://aetgweb.argreenhouse.com/ ) . The generated test
cases can be used for manual testing or to drive some other automated test tools.

• Allpairs ( http://www.satisfice.com/tools.shtml ) by James Bach.

• BOAS ( http://lcs.ios.ac.cn/~zj/ct.html ) focuses on the generation of orthogonal

arrays (OAs). The basic algorithm is backtracking search, described in Chap. 6 .