Combinatorial Coverage as an Aspect of Test Quality

There are relatively few good methods for evaluating test set quality, after ensuring basic requirements-traceability. Structural coverage, mutation testing, and related methods can be used if source code is available, but these approaches may entail significant cost in time and resources. This paper introduces an alter­ native measure of test quality that is directly related to fault detection, simple to compute, and can be applied prior to execution of the system under test. As such, it provides an inexpensive complement to current approaches for evaluating test quality.