Speakers
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Dr Kamal Zuhairi Zamli Deputy Dean (Research and Postgraduate Studies), School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universiti Sains Malaysia

Dr Kamal Zuhairi Zamli is a senior lecturer in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universiti Sains Malaysia. He holds BSc in EE (1992) from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA, MSc in Real Time Software Engineering from Center for Advanced Software Engineering, Universiti Teknology Malaysia (2001), and PhD in Software Engineering from University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (2003). His research interests are software engineering (specializing on combinatorial software testing and process modelling), Object-Oriented development as well as the design of algorithms and data structures.

Tutorial E1: T-Way Strategies: Systematic Test Data Reduction Techniques for Hardware and Software Testing
Combinatorial explosion problem poses one of the biggest challenges in modern computer science due to the fact that it often defies traditional approaches to analysis, verification, monitoring and control. A number of techniques have been explored in the past to address this problem. Undoubtedly, parallel testing can be employed to reduce the time required for performing the tests. Nevertheless, as software and hardware are getting more complex than ever, parallel testing approach becomes immensely expensive due to the need for faster and higher capability processors along state-of-the-art computer hardware. Apart from parallel testing, systematic random testing could also be another option. However, systematic random testing tends to dwell on unfair distribution of test cases.

A more recent and systematic solution to this problem is based on t-way testing strategy, where t denotes the interaction strength. Here, any t-way combinations of parameter values are to be covered by at least one test. Because combinatorial explosion problem is NP-complete, it is often unlikely that efficient strategy exists that can always generate optimal test set (i.e. each interaction pair is covered by only one test). Furthermore, the size of the minimum pairwise test set also grows logarithmically with the number of parameter and quadratically with the number of value. This tutorial aims to introduce the fundamentals for t-way testing. Supporting this aim, the objectives of the tutorial are:

• To discuss the state of the art on t-way testing
• To elaborate on selected deterministic and indeterministic strategies for t-way testing with practical exercises
• To demonstrate the possible implementation of the selected strategies
• To discuss issues as well as possible research avenues in the area