Abstract: A complex software system is usually affected by a lot of factors. Their interactions complicate the system behavior and cause various faults. It is impossible to exhaustively test all the interactions. Combinatorial testing uses a small number of test cases to guarantee the test quality by considering the factors different influence on systems. The paper proposes a novel method of test suite generation based on harmony search algorithm. The method solves the key issues of N-way combinatorial coverage and variable-strength combinatorial coverage. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.


Key words: harmony search, combinatorial testing, test suite, N-way interaction, covering array