Combinatorial Methods for Event Sequence Testing

Many software testing problems involve sequences of events. This paper applies combinatorial methods to testing problems that have n distinct events, where each event occurs exactly once. The methods described in this paper were motivated by testing needs for systems that may accept multiple communication or sensor connections and generate output to several communication links and other interfaces, where it is important to test the order in which connections occur. Although pair wise event order testing (both A followed by B and B followed by A) has been described, our algorithm ensures that any t events will be tested in every possible t-way order.