Adaptive random testing with combinatorial input domain

Random testing (RT) is a fundamental testing technique to assess software reliability, by simply selecting test cases in a random manner from the whole input domain. As an enhancement of RT, adaptive random testing (ART) has better failure-detection capability and has been widely applied in different scenarios, such as numerical programs, some object-oriented programs, and mobile applications. However, not much work has been done on the effectiveness of ART for the programs with combinatorial input domain (i.e., the set of categorical data). To extend the ideas to the testing for combinatorial input domain, we have adopted different similarity measures that are widely used for categorical data in data mining and have proposed two similarity measures based on interaction coverage. Then, we propose a new version named ART-CID as an extension of ART in combinatorial input domain, which selects an element from categorical data as the next test case such that it has the lowest similarity against already generated test cases. Experimental results show that ART-CID generally performs better than RT, with respect to different evaluation metrics.