A Constraint Solving Problem Towards Unified Combinatorial Interaction Testing

Combinatorial Interaction Testing (CIT) approaches aim to reveal failures caused by the interactions of factors, such as input parameters and configuration options. Our ultimate goal in this line of research is to improve the practicality of CIT approaches. To this end, we have been working on developing what we call Unified Combinatorial Interaction Testing (U-CIT), which not only represents most (if not all) combinatorial objects that have been developed so far, but also allows testers to develop their own application-specific combinatorial objects for testing. However, realizing U-CIT in practice requires us to solve an interesting constraint solving problem. In this work we informally define the problem and present a greedy algorithm to solve it. Our gaol is not so much to present a solution, but to introduce the problem, the solution of which (we believe) is of great practical importance.