If you're working in the .NET world, either NUnit or MbUnit
have a Pairwise attribute used to generate test cases from
a set of parameter values.

Charlie

> -----Original Message-----
> From: testdrivendevelopment@yahoogroups.com
> [mailto:testdrivendevelopment@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Dale Emery
> Sent: Thursday, July 09, 2009 9:50 PM
> To: testdrivendevelopment@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [TDD] Agile response to combinatorial explosion
>
> Hi Andrew,
>
> I'm trying to figure out the right approach in my thinking
> here. Suppose you
> > have an application which has 10 different configuration
> options. Each
> > option has 3 different settings. It doesn't take rocket science to
> > figure out that this means 3^10 or over 59000 configurations. And
> > those are small numbers! Certainly we can't write a test for every
> > single one of these cases. Yet it's also hard to be absolutely sure
> > that they're completely independent. I recently had a UI
> bug that was
> > unexpectedly caused by bad data in a completely different
> area of the
> > site, and I really don't think it was caused by poor
> design. So what
> > do we make of this? How shall we then test?
>
>
> One common approach is to make this simplifying assumption:
> Most combination-related problems are caused by interactions
> of PAIRs of variables, and very few are caused by larger tuples.
>
> I have no idea under what circumstances that assumption is
> warranted. I do know that making the assumption greatly
> reduces the number of combinations you need. There's a
> technique called All Pairs Analysis (aka Pairwise
> Analysis) that yields a minimal set of combinations that
> includes every pair of values for every pair of variables.
>
> If you're willing to make the pairwise assumption (and accept
> the attendant risks), give All Pairs Analysis a try. James
> Bach offers a free tool on his web site:
> http://www.satisfice.com/tools.shtml
>
> Dale
>
> --
> Dale Emery, Consultant
> Inspiring Leadership for Software People
> Web: http://dhemery.com
> Weblog: http://cwd.dhemery.com
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
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