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IBM Intelligent Test Case Handler
An Eclipse plug-in for creating test configuration data subject to coverage criteria.
Date Posted: June 9, 2005
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What is IBM Intelligent Test Case Handler?
This technology is an Eclipse plug-in for generation and manipulation of test input data or configurations. It can be used to minimize the amount of testing while maintaining complete coverage of interacting variables. Intelligent Test Case Handler enables the user to generate small test suites with strong coverage properties, choose regression suites, and perform other useful operations for the creation of systematic software test plans. It is a combination of technologies from the Watson and Haifa Research Laboratories, and it has an extensible interface enabling other algorithms to be plugged in by sophisticated users.
Currently, a predecessor of Intelligent Test Case Handler exists on alphaworks: Combinatorial Test Services (CTS).
How does it work? Intelligent Test Case Handler uses sophisticated combinatorial algorithms to construct test suites with given coverage properties over large parameter spaces. The use of combinatorial covering configurations, also known as pairwise testing, is a well-known technique for covering large input spaces. Such configurations are not always easy to construct. Intelligent Test Case Handler provides a simple method of creating such configurations with additional features for practical test case generation and manipulation.
Intelligent Test Case Handler enables the user to perform the following actions:
- Define the sets of testing variables
- Create test suites with given coverage properties
- Create test suites with a maximum number of test cases
- Include important test cases
- Exclude specific combinations of values
- Provide higher levels of coverage for particular subsets of the variables
- Print the test suites in a variety of formats, including CSV for importation to Microsoft® Excel.
As an example, consider the testing of an Internet site that must function correctly on three operating systems (Windows®, Linux®, and Solaris), two browsers (Explorer and Netscape), three printers (Epson, HP, and IBM), and two communication protocols (Token Ring and Ethernet). Although there are 36 possible test configurations, nine tests cover all the pairwise interactions between different parameters of the system.
The interactions between operating systems and printers are all covered precisely once, but some interactions between operating systems and browsers are covered more than once. For example, Windows and Explorer are tested together twice in the test suite:
| Operating System |
Browser |
Printer Protocol |
| Windows |
Explorer |
Epson Token Ring |
| Windows |
Netscape |
HP Ethernet |
| Windows |
Explorer |
IBM Ethernet |
| Linux |
Netscape |
Epson Token Ring |
| Linux |
Explorer |
HP Ethernet |
| Linux |
Netscape |
IBM Token Ring |
| Solaris |
Explorer |
Epson Ethernet |
| Solaris |
Netscape |
HP Token Ring |
| Solaris |
Explorer |
IBM Ethernet |
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| | About the technology author(s):
Alan Hartman holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Newcastle in Australia; an M.Sc. in mathematics from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology; and a B.Sc. (Hons) in mathematics from Monash University in Australia. He joined IBM Haifa Research Laboratory in 1983 after a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Dr. Hartman has spent two periods on leave at the University of Toronto and at Telstra Research Laboratories. His career at IBM has included research in storage technologies, communications network design, mathematical optimization, and hardware and software verification. Dr. Hartman is currently managing the Model-Driven Engineering Technologies group.
Tim Klinger is a researcher in the Software Engineering group at the T. J. Watson Research Center. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. from New York University, where his dissertation was on logical reasoning in adversarial settings and its application to computers; he received his B.A. from McGill University in Canada. Dr. Klinger's current work is primarily in model-based test generation using planning techniques, combinatorial test generation, automated refactoring, and rule-based risk assessment for project management.
Leonid Raskin is an M.Sc. student in computer science at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, where he earned his B.Sc. (Hons) in computer engineering. Mr. Raskin joined the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory in 2002. |
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