Towards Accessibility of Covering Arrays for Practitioners of Combinatorial Testing

Combinatorial testing can be useful not only for large software-related testing efforts. While it seems worthwhile to evaluate its benefits for more general applications, lack of immediate availability of suitable arrays is a major impediment against its wider use by practitioners. This paper discusses requirements for making covering arrays (CAs), a key tool in combinatorial testing, accessible to practitioners of various application areas in a way that satisfies their needs. It is argued that, by fulfilling such requirements, the expert community also improves exchange of results among its members. The paper is thus intended as a call for action for the combinatorial testing community to improve the sharing of CA constructions.