Products of mixed covering arrays of strength two
Charles J. Colbourn, Sosina S. Martirosyan, Gary L. Mullen, Dennis E. Shasha, George B. Sherwood, Joseph L. Yucas · Journal of Combinatorial Designs · 2005
Abstract Acovering arrayCA(N;t,k,vis anN × karray such that everyN × tsubarray contains allt‐tuples fromvsymbolsat leastonce, wheretis thestrengthof the array. Covering arrays are used to generate software test suites to cover allt‐sets of component interactions. The particular case whent = 2 (pairwise coverage) has been extensively studied, both to develop combinatorial constructions and to provide effective algorithmic search techniques. In this paper, a simple “cut‐and‐paste” construction is extended to covering arrays in which different columns (factors) admit different numbers of symbols (values); in the process an improved recursive construction for covering arrays witht = 2 is derived. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 14: 124–138, 2006