Design and implementation of a harmony-search-based variable-strength t-way testing strategy with constraints support

Context: Although useful, Al-based variable strength t-way strategies are lacking in terms of the support for high interaction strength. Additionally, most Al-based strategies generally do not address the support for constraints. Addressing the aforementioned issues, this paper elaborates the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel variable-strength-based on harmony search algorithm, called Harmony Search Strategy (HSS). Objective: The objective of this work is to investigate the adoption of harmony search algorithm for constructing variable-strength t-way strategy. Method: Implemented in Java, HSS integrates the harmony search algorithm as parts of its search engine. Result: Benchmarking results demonstrate that HSS gives competitive results against most existing Al-based (and pure computational) counterparts. However, unlike other Al-based counterparts, HSS addresses the support for high interaction strength and permits the support for constraints. Conclusion: Al-based t-way strategies tend to outperform the pure computational-based strategies in terms of test size. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.