Combination testing strategies: a survey

Combination strategies are test case selection methods that identify test cases by combining values of the different test object input parameters based on some combinatorial strategy. This survey presents 16 different combination strategies, covering more than 40 papers that focus on one or several combination strategies. This collection represents most of the existing work performed on combination strategies. This survey describes the basic algorithms used by the combination strategies. Some properties of combination strategies, including coverage criteria and theoretical bounds on the size of test suites, are also included in this description. This survey paper also includes a subsumption hierarchy that attempts to relate the various coverage criteria associated with the identified combination strategies.