摘要：The limitation of time and budget usually prohibits exhaustive testing of interactions between comp onents in a component based software system. Combinatorial testing is a software testing technique that can be used to detect faults in a component based software system caused by the interactions of components in an e.ective and e.cient way. Most of the research in the field of combinatorial testing till now has focused on the construction of optimal covering array (CA) of fixed strength t which covers all t-way interactions among components. The size of CA increases with the increase in strength of testing t, which further increases the cost of testing. However, not all components require higher strength interaction testing. Hence, in a system with k components a technique is required to construct CA of fixed strength t which covers all t-way interactions among k components and all t i -way (where t i > t) interactions between a subset of k components. This is achieved using the variable strength covering array (VSCA). In this paper we propose a greedy based genetic algorithm (GA) to generate optimal VSCA. Experiments are conducted on several benchmark configurations to evaluate the e.ectiveness of the proposed approach.
