Consecutive Detecting Arrays for Interaction Faults

The concept of detecting arrays was developed to locate and detect interaction faults arising between the factors in a component-based system during software testing. In this paper, we propose a family of consecutive detecting arrays (CDAs) in which the interactions between factors are considered to be ordered. CDAs can be used to generate test suites for locating and detecting interaction faults between neighboring factors. We establish a general criterion for measuring the optimality of CDAs in terms of their size. Based on this optimality criterion, the equivalence between optimum CDAs and consecutive orthogonal arrays with prescribed properties is explored. Using the advantages of this equivalence, a great number of optimum CDAs are presented. In particular, the existence of optimum CDAs with few factors is completely determined.