Event Driven Input Sequence T-Way Test Strategy Using Simulated Annealing

Exhaustive testing for event driven sequence input interaction is costly and not always practicable for all types of software testing. So, an alternative technique is crucial where optimum/near optimum test case generation is key concern. This paper presents a feasible test suite generation technique using Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm for Event Driven Input Sequence Testing (EDIST)and called EDIST-SA T-way test strategy. The EDIST-SA technique focuses on a heuristic analysis for generating feasible and near optimum test suite(s), where a cost function carefully initiates acceptable test candidates and a fine-tuned cooling rate with temperature takes part as an iterative perspective. We corroborate on EDIST-SA algorithm by doing a large number of experiments to achieve optimum and/or near optimum test cases from a large number of test candidates. The experimental results are tested on a real application called Embedded Network Traffic Monitoring System (ENTM). Analysis on EDIST-SA strategy shows that the optimum test suite is found from some of the iterated solution and there is possibility to have more feasible accepted test suites.

I. Background

Software test planning is a crucial topic for the hardware/software development companies. It is not only important but also expensive once we want to go through a system (combine with software and hardware) development process. Many sequences of possible inputs must be checked to verify the behavior a system. Investigation says that the software test planning and testing requires at least 50% cost of the total cost, but it may cost higher once the hardware and safety-critical services are included [1]. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) estimated that the annual cost of inadequate testing in US as much as $59 billion [2]. This estimation focuses the significance of effective methods for software test planning.