On the effectiveness of the optimally refined proportional sampling testing strategy

Recently, the effectiveness of subdomain testing and random testing has been studied analytically. T.Y. Chen and Y.T. Yu (1994) found that, for the case of disjoint subdomains, as long as the number of test cases selected from each subdomain is proportional to its size (the proportional sampling strategy), the probability of revealing at least one failure using subdomain testing is not less than that using random testing. This paper investigates the effectiveness of the optimally refined proportional sampling (ORPS) strategy, which is a special case of the proportional sampling strategy. The ORPS strategy is simple in concept, and the implementation cost is usually low. An empirical study has been conducted for a sample of published programs with seeded errors. The performance of this strategy was found to be better than random testing.