Refining the In-Parameter-Order Strategy for Constructing Covering Arrays.
Covering arrays are structures for well-representing extremely large input spaces and are used to efficiently implement blackbox testing for software and hardware. This paper proposes refinements over the In-Parameter-Order strategy (for arbitrary t). When constructing homogeneous-alphabet covering arrays, these refinements reduce runtime in nearly all cases by a factor of more than 5 and in some cases by factors as large as 280. This trend is increasing with the number of columns in the covering array. Moreover, the resulting covering arrays are about 5 % smaller. Consequently, this new algorithm has constructed many covering arrays that are the smallest in the literature. A heuristic variant of the algorithm sometimes produces comparably sized covering arrays while running significantly faster.
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899.
Michael
M
Forbes
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899.
Jim
J
Lawrence
University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX 76019.
Yu
Y
Lei
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899.
Raghu N
RN
Kacker
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899.
D Richard
DR
Kuhn
blackbox testing; covering arrays; pairwise and higher strength testing