Applying a Pairwise Coverage Criterion to Scenario-Based Testing

Abstract

Some scenario-based testing approaches propose to express a test suite as a regular expression (called scenario or pattern). It specifies a set of valid sequences of operations in a abstract way. When the regular expression is "unfold", test sequences are obtained. Usually, the unfolding is done in an exhaustive way, which can result in a combinatorial explosion. In this article, we explore a pairwise coverage criterion to select a subset of test sequences satisfying the pattern, in order to decrease the number of test sequences. The originality of the approach lies in the fact that the pairwise criterion is applied to the instantiated method calls (and not on the parameters). We applied this strategy to generate unit tests for Java classes. The quality of the test suites is evaluated with a mutation analysis and compared to test suites randomly generated.