A Hybrid Artificial Bee Colony and Harmony Search Algorithm to Generate Covering Arrays for Pair-wise Testing

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Author(s)

Priti Bansal 1,* Sangeeta Sabharwal 1 Nitish Mittal 1

1. Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, Sector-3, Dwarka, New Delhi-110078, India

* Corresponding author.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijisa.2017.08.07

Received: 8 Jan. 2017 / Revised: 15 Feb. 2017 / Accepted: 22 Feb. 2017 / Published: 8 Aug. 2017

Index Terms

Covering array, pair-wise testing, artificial bee colony, harmony search

Abstract

Combinatorial Interaction Testing (CIT) is a cost effective testing technique that aims to detect interaction faults generated as a result of interaction between components or parameters in a software system. CIT requires the generation of effective test sets that cover all possible t-way (t denotes the strength of testing) interactions between parameters. Covering array (CA) and mixed covering array (MCA) are often used to represent test sets. This paper presents a hybrid algorithm that integrates artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) and harmony search algorithm (HS) to construct CAs for testing all 2-way interactions (pair-wise testing) in software systems. The performance of the proposed hybrid algorithm ABCHS-CAG is compared and analyzed by performing experiments on a set of benchmark problems on pair-wise testing. The results show that ABCHS-CAG generates smaller CAs than its greedy counterparts whereas its performance is comparable to the existing state-of-the-art meta-heuristic algorithms.

Cite This Paper

Priti Bansal, Sangeeta Sabharwal, Nitish Mittal, "A Hybrid Artificial Bee Colony and Harmony Search Algorithm to Generate Covering Arrays for Pair-wise Testing", International Journal of Intelligent Systems and Applications(IJISA), Vol.9, No.8, pp.59-70, 2017. DOI:10.5815/ijisa.2017.08.07

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