Combinatorial Testing Guide

So what is the Combinatorial Testing Guide all about?

Right, so we looked briefly at the idea of "traces" in the User Guide. The idea is that a trace, defined within a VDM specification, can be expanded to a large number of independent tests. This expansion process is called "combinatorial testing", because we're generating tests using all possible combinations of options.

And the User Guide explains how they work?

Well, only superficially. It has to introduce them to show how to use them from the command line, which is the purpose of the User Guide. But it leaves out a lot of detail. The Combinatorial Testing Guide fills in those gaps and gives more realistic examples.

I see. So who should read this one?

It's useful for any specifier who wants to test their specification with a large number of systematically generated tests.

That sounds like most people?

It is a very important and powerful aspect of the tools, yes. Most specifications would benefit from testing with traces. At the very least you can create a trace which runs each of the one-shot tests that you've created. The tool can then be instructed to run all of your tests in a batch and show you the results, which is useful.

It sounds like an interesting area. I'll take a look!