Identifying failure-inducing combinations with tuple relationship tree

Combinatorial testing using covering array composed by parameter values as test suite, it is good at detecting whether there exist bug caused by interactions among these parameters. A test case in covering array contains many parameter interactions (called tuples), some of them may cause the test case fail, it is an important problem to find which one or some caused this failure. There are some methods proposed in recent years trying to solve this problem. However, in these studies, the relationships among candidate tuple didn't raise enough attention. Furthermore, they are not efficient enough or even completed. In this paper, we constructed a candidate tuple relationship tree (TRT) to describe the relationships among all the candidate tuples. TRT facilitate our localizing progress by reducing additional test cases generated and providing a clear view of all possible candidate tuples so that any fault interaction, such as overlapped interaction, would not be missed. And based on TRT, we proposed four search methods to realize fault-localizing progress. Experiment shows that our method can get a more completed result than existing methods, and also very efficient. ©, 2014, Science Press. All right reserved.