■ Combinatorial Methods in Testing
2016
Developers of large software systems oen notice an interesting phenomenon: usage of an application suddenly increases, and components that worked correctly for years develop previously undetected failures. For example, the application may have been installed with a different operating system (OS) or database management system (DBMS) than used previously, or newly added customers may have account records with combinations of values that have not occurred before. Some of these rare combinations trigger failures that have escaped previous testing and extensive use. Such failures are known as interaction failures, because they are only exposed when two or more input values interact to cause the program to reach an incorrect result.