JMP 13 Design of Experiments Guide

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 ...