Combinatorial Testing

This course provides an overview of combinatorial testing concepts and provides hands-on experience for everyone from beginners to experts with a course outcome of confidently generating their own combinatorial test suites. Students will understand terminology, concepts, and applications of combinatorial testing. The course teaches students to use a freely available and award winning open source tool called ACTS – Advanced Combinatorial Testing Services so that they are able to generate their own combinatorial test suites for the courses exercises and outside applications.  (Students are also pointed to other free combinatorial testing tools, but we chose ACTS due to it being free, from a trusted source, and easy to use!) Videos with lecture slides and demos, quizzes, and exercises guide students through the highly hands-on learning experience.

This course benefits software developers, testers, scientists, engineers, and college students who want to advance their knowledge of testing systems. Consider that products released with inadequate testing can cause bodily harm, result in economic losses, and affect the quality of day-to-day life. Software defects cost our economy billions of dollars each year.  Software developers and testers often test for problems that they anticipate while unanticipated bugs slip through the cracks. Exhaustive testing is often impractical. Combinatorial testing is often a cost-effective technique to augment current testing practices. That is, it will not replace current software testing processes, but it is a relatively low cost testing solution that provides systematic coverage of parameters or components under test.