T-Way Testing Strategies: A Critical Survey and Analysis

Sampling techniques based on interaction testing (termed t-way strategies) have been known to be effective to detect bugs due to interaction. However, despite offering inherent advantages in terms of reducing the testing efforts and potentially costs, t-way strategies are still hardly accepted by practitioners and software engineering community at large. In order to address the aforementioned issues, this paper presents a critical survey and analysis of existing t-way strategies in order to identify their strong points and weaknesses, thereby forming a useful guideline for the future development of t-way strategy. Unlike earlier work which focuses on strategies that support uniform and variable strength t-way interaction, this survey also considers the contributions from research into input-output based relations