A harmony search based pairwise sampling strategy for combinatorial testing

Over the years, we become increasingly dependent on software in many activities of our lives. To ensure software quality and reliability, many combinations of possible input parameters, hardware/software environments and system conditions need to be tested and verified against for conformance. Due to resource constraints and time-to-market pressure, considering all exhaustive testing is practically impossible. In order to address this issue, a number of pairwise testing (and sampling) strategies have been developed in the literature in the past 15 years. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel pairwise strategy called pairwise harmony search algorithm-based strategy (PHSS). Based on the published benchmarking results, the PHSS strategy outperforms most existing strategies in terms of the generated test size in many of the parameter configurations considered. In the case where the PHSS is not the most optimal, the resulting test size is sufficiently competitive. PHSS serves as our research vehicle to investigate the effective use of harmony search (HS) algorithm for pairwise test data reduction.