Overview of Covering Arrays
You can use covering arrays to test systems where failures occur as a result of interactions among components or subsystems. Covering arrays are often used in areas such as software, circuit, and network design, where the following conditions are likely to be true:
• The cost of testing is usually high.
• Testing focuses on revealing interactions for which failures occur.
• A test run is typically deterministic and results in either success or failure.
• Replicate runs are wasteful because they yield identical results.
• The efficiency of a design is based on how many of the possible conditions are covered without including redundant runs.
Because systems testing is expensive, reducing the amount of testing is critical. ...