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Pairwise Testing & PICT Tool

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When we are testing an application, we have to see the how the application behaves in various combinations of OS's, Platforms, etc. The following table gives demonstrates that we have to test our app for the following combinations

1

OS

Win XP, Win 2003 SVr, Vista, Win NT4

2

Language

English, German, Japanese, Arabic

3

CLR

Installed, not installed

4

Platform

X86, AMD64

5

IE

5.0, 6.0

 

There are 4*4*2*2*2 = 128 possible combinations for selecting 1 value for each of the above 5 parameters in combination with other e.g (Win XP, English, Installed, X86, 5.0) etc.

 

This takes a lot of time to test. We can use pairwise testing to reduce the number of combinations and also achieve full coverage simultaneously.

 

Some goals of pairwise testing are

  • Each value of each parameter is tested at least once
  • Each variable in each parameter is tested in a pair with every variable in other parameters
  • Pairs of variables that exist in other combinations can be dropped from the matrix of combinations

 

If we follow the above rules, we can reduce the number of combinations to 16.

 

Luckily, we have tools that find the combinations for us and one such tool is PICT. You can download PICT from https://download.microsoft.com/download/f/5/5/f55484df-8494-48fa-8dbd-8c6f76cc014b/pict33.msi

 

Also, this tool enables us to

  • specify constains (eg. If CLR is installed, then we have to use IE 6.0)
  • specify equivalent combinations (e.g. Japanese and German languages are likely to produce the same results).

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 23, 2011
    Can u please explain some more about this tool. . . Specially limitations of this tool (As e.g. How many parameters can be used at once)

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2015
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 26, 2015
    refer to www.amibugshare.com/.../help.html this program needs to be used in command prompt

  • Anonymous
    November 10, 2015
    you just need to install it then open cmd . navigate to where PICT is located and write PICT.exe NAMEOFFILEWITHVARIABLES > NAMEOFRESULTFILE