Deriving Fault Locating Test Cases from Constrained Covering Arrays

Combinatorial Interaction Testing (CIT) is a well practiced strategy for testing of software systems. Ordinary CIT detects faults caused by interactions of parameters but cannot locate faulty interactions. This paper addresses the problem of adding fault localization capability to CIT. This is done by means of fault locating suites of test cases, which are named constrained locating arrays. An algorithm that derives a constrained locating array from a test suite for ordinary CIT is proposed. Experimental results show that the new algorithm can construct constrained locating arrays for fairly large sized problem instances in reasonable time.