A statistical assessment of some software testing strategies and application of experimental design techniques
Vijayan N. Nair, Decraene James, Willa K. Ehrlich, J. Zevallos · Statistica Sinica · 1998
An important problem in software testing is the efficient generation of test cases. Two classes of strategies, random and partition testing, have been dis- cussed extensively in the software testing literature. In this paper, we provide a systematic statistical comparison of these two classes of strategies and demonstrate the usefulness of partition testing. We also show that some of the previous con- clusions in the software testing literature about the inefficiency of partition testing are incorrect. The applicability of experimental design methods for partition test- ing is also discussed. A real application is used to illustrate the various concepts and to demonstrate the usefulness of experimental design methods for generating partitions.