Refining the In-Parameter-Order Strategy for Constructing Covering Arrays

• Published in: Journal of research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Vol. 113; no. 5; pp. 287 - 297
• Main Authors: Forbes, Michael, Lawrence, Jim, Lei, Yu, Kacker, Raghu N., Kuhn, D. Richard
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States National Institute of Standards and Technology 01.09.2008; Superintendent of Documents; [Gaithersburg, MD] : U.S. Dept. of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Subjects: Algorithms; Arrays; Deterrence (Strategy); Flexible response (Strategy); Matrix; Software; pairwise and higher strength testing; blackbox testing; covering arrays
• ISSN: 1044-677X; 2165-7254; 2165-7254
• DOI: 10.6028/jres.113.022

Covering arrays are structures for well-representing extremely large input spaces and are used to efficiently implement blackbox testing for software and hardware. This paper proposes refinements over the In-Parameter-Order strategy (for arbitrary t). When constructing homogeneous-alphabet covering arrays, these refinements reduce runtime in nearly all cases by a factor of more than 5 and in some cases by factors as large as 280. This trend is increasing with the number of columns in the covering array. Moreover, the resulting covering arrays are about 5 % smaller. Consequently, this new algorithm has constructed many covering arrays that are the smallest in the literature. A heuristic variant of the algorithm sometimes produces comparably sized covering arrays while running significantly faster.