Hi Wayne,
Thanks for the post. I’d like to offer a couple of clarifications.
ACTS is distributed by Rick Kuhn and Raghu Kacker at NIST. Yu (Jeff) Lei, at University of Texas at Arlington, has led the development of the tool. Testcover.com is an online service for combinatorial test design also. It is a site for MoT to practice testing on Products and sites to practice testing on. And you can use it to generate test designs, of course.
Combinatorial test designs do not include all possible variables. If you try to do that, you get too many test cases right away. Combinatorial designs allow you to cover all interactions between variables with a small number of test cases. For example, for 5 variables having 3 values each, there are 3x3x3x3x3 = 243 possible test cases. But to cover the variables’ pairwise interactions, you need only 11 test cases (below).
Here, an interaction is an association of 2 variables’ values, for example, the value Friday for Variable 2 with the value cloudy for Variable 5. Those values are in test case number 4. There are 90 interactions in this example, and they’re all covered in the 11 test cases.
George
