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Effectiveness of Combinatorial Test Design with Executable Business Processes

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Abstract

Executable business processes contain complex business rules, control flow, and data transformations, which makes designing good tests difficult and, in current practice, requires extensive expert knowledge. In order to reduce the time and errors in manual test design, we investigated using automatic combinatorial test design (CTD) instead. CTD is a test selection method that aims at covering all interactions of a few input parameters. For this investigation, we integrated CTD algorithms with an existing framework that combines equivalence class partitioning with automatic BPELUnit test generation. Based on several industrial cases, we evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of test suites selected via CTD algorithms against those selected by experts and random tests. The experiments show that CTD tests are not more efficient than tests designed by experts, but that they are a sufficiently effective automatic alternative.

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Lübke, D., Greenyer, J., Vatlin, D. (2019). Effectiveness of Combinatorial Test Design with Executable Business Processes. In: Lübke, D., Pautasso, C. (eds) Empirical Studies on the Development of Executable Business Processes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17666-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17666-2_9

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17665-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17666-2

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