Pairwise Testing...

Have you ever felt that there are just too many cases to take care of? Too many options to try? That suppose you made a product like Word and Font size 8 works well with Times New Roman with red color, but what if you change the color to blue, or the size to 20 or the font to Arial.... or for that matter choose one of those 64 font types, a size anywhere between 0-72 and a color anywhere from deepest black to lightest white! These are thousands of combinations, how would you test your product for each of these values? Random testing is not an option. Neither is testing what you feel important.

We can save time and effort and find bugs efficiently by testing variables and values in combination.

Michael Hunter explains how to go about this scenario using pairwaise testing.

http://blogs.msdn.com/micahel/archive/2004/04/28/122702.aspx

Dave Fries has a post at:

http://weblogs.asp.net/davfries/archive/2004/06/17/158900.aspx

Dave also points out to the following link for a much detailed explanation:

http://www.developsense.com/testing/PairwiseTesting.html

I would suggest to start off with Dave's post, follow it up with Michael's and then go for the detailed one. Altho the last one (by Michael Bolton) clears up everything, go through Hunter's and Fries first and try to see if certain questions are raised in your mind. If yes, those will be cleared up when you read what Bolton writes. Try it as an exercise!