TY - JOUR
T1 - Test-Algebra-Based Fault Location Analysis for the Concurrent Combinatorial Testing
AU - Qi, Guanqiu
AU - Tsai, Wei Tek
AU - Colbourn, Charles
AU - Luo, Jie
AU - Zhu, Zhiqin
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received July 31, 2017; revised January 5, 2018; accepted April 20, 2018. Date of publication June 27, 2018; date of current version August 30, 2018. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, under Grant 61633005 and Grant 61773080. Associate Editor: Z. Chen. (Corresponding author: Guanqiu Qi.) G. Qi is with the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287 USA, and also with the Mathematics and Computer and Information Science Department, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, Mansfield, PA 16933 USA (e-mail:, guanqiuq@ asu.edu).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1963-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2018/9
Y1 - 2018/9
N2 - A new algebraic system, test algebra (TA), is proposed for identifying faults in combinatorial testing for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. In the context of cloud computing, SaaS is a new software delivery model, in which mission-critical applications are composed, deployed, and executed on cloud platforms. Testing SaaS applications is challenging because new applications need to be tested once they are composed, and prior to their deployment. A composition of components providing services yields a configuration providing an SaaS application. While individual components in the configuration may have been thoroughly tested, faults still arise due to interactions among the components composed, making the configuration faulty. When there are k components, combinatorial testing algorithms can be used to identify faulty interactions with t or fewer components, for some threshold 2 ≤t ≤q k on the size of interactions considered. In general, these methods do not identify specific faults, but rather indicate the presence or absence of some faults. To identify specific faults, an adaptive testing regime repeatedly constructs and tests configurations in order to determine, for each interaction of interest, whether it is faulty or not. In order to perform such testing in a loosely coupled distributed environment such as the cloud, it is imperative that testing results can be combined from many different servers. The TA defines rules to permit results to be combined, and to identify the faulty interactions. Using the TA, configurations can be tested concurrently on different servers and in any order. The TA always keeps the high reduction rate of potential faulty configurations in fault location analysis.
AB - A new algebraic system, test algebra (TA), is proposed for identifying faults in combinatorial testing for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. In the context of cloud computing, SaaS is a new software delivery model, in which mission-critical applications are composed, deployed, and executed on cloud platforms. Testing SaaS applications is challenging because new applications need to be tested once they are composed, and prior to their deployment. A composition of components providing services yields a configuration providing an SaaS application. While individual components in the configuration may have been thoroughly tested, faults still arise due to interactions among the components composed, making the configuration faulty. When there are k components, combinatorial testing algorithms can be used to identify faulty interactions with t or fewer components, for some threshold 2 ≤t ≤q k on the size of interactions considered. In general, these methods do not identify specific faults, but rather indicate the presence or absence of some faults. To identify specific faults, an adaptive testing regime repeatedly constructs and tests configurations in order to determine, for each interaction of interest, whether it is faulty or not. In order to perform such testing in a loosely coupled distributed environment such as the cloud, it is imperative that testing results can be combined from many different servers. The TA defines rules to permit results to be combined, and to identify the faulty interactions. Using the TA, configurations can be tested concurrently on different servers and in any order. The TA always keeps the high reduction rate of potential faulty configurations in fault location analysis.
KW - Algebra
KW - cloud computing
KW - combinatorial testing (CT)
KW - fault location analysis
KW - software-as-a-service (SaaS)
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U2 - 10.1109/TR.2018.2833449
DO - 10.1109/TR.2018.2833449
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85049129945
SN - 0018-9529
VL - 67
SP - 802
EP - 831
JO - IEEE Transactions on Reliability
JF - IEEE Transactions on Reliability
IS - 3
M1 - 8398472
ER -