Baital: an adaptive weighted sampling approach for improved t-wise coverage

Abstract

The rise of highly configurable complex software and its widespread usage requires design of efficient testing methodology. t-wise coverage is a leading metric to measure the quality of the testing suite and the underlying test generation engine. While uniform sampling-based test generation is widely believed to be the state of the art approach to achieve t-wise coverage in presence of constraints on the set of configurations, such a scheme often fails to achieve high t-wise coverage in presence of complex constraints. In this work, we propose a novel approach Baital, based on adaptive weighted sampling using literal weighted functions, to generate test sets with high t-wise coverage. We demonstrate that our approach reaches significantly higher t-wise coverage than uniform sampling. The novel usage of literal weighted sampling leaves open several interesting directions, empirical as well as theoretical, for future research.