I’ve recommended combinatorial or pairwise tools frequently in my Automation Isn’t Shiny Toys talk. I think it’s a great way to cut down large matrices of input data or configurations. These tools can save you incredible amounts of time – as James Bach mentions on his Allpairs blurb, you can potentially cut 10,000,000,000 test cases down to 177.
Them’s big apples, folks.
Here are a few of the resources I’ve mentioned in that segment of the talk:
- Pairwise.org. A great starting place to learn about combinatorial or pairwise testing.
- Allpairs. Nifty Perl script from James Bach.
- ACTS. Another nice tool from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It’s freely available, but you have to ask.
- MbUnit. Lovely test framework for the .NET platform which has combinatorial features built in!
I encourage you to do a bit of reading on the subject and see if it might be helpful for you!
Update: I totally forgot to mention Hexawise, an interesting tool/service. I haven’t personally used it, but I’ve read up on it and follow founder Justin Hunter on Twitter. Interesting pricing model, too.
