SCRC 2005 / FIM XII
   Hosted by Auburn University

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Presidential Invited Plenary Session
Date/time: 12:30-2:00p.m., Friday, Dec. 2, 2005

 
 Charles J. Colbourn was born in Toronto, Canada in 1953. He completed his B.Sc. degree at the University of Toronto in 1976, M.Math. at the University of Waterloo in 1978, and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1980, all in computer science. He has held faculty positions at the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Vermont, and is now Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. He is the author of in excess of 250 refereed journal papers in combinatorial designs, combinatorial algorithms, and networking. He is co-editor of the CRC Handbook of Combinatorial Designs and author of "Triple Systems" and "The Combinatorics of Network Reliability", both from Oxford University Press. He is an editor-in-chief of the Journal of Combinatorial Designs, and serves on the editorial boards of JSPI; JCT(A); Discrete Mathematics; Designs, Codes, and Cryptography; and Networks. His research concerns applications of combinatorial designs in software testing, networking, computing, and communications."

Combinatorial Designs for Software Interaction Testing

Testing software that is produced by combining numerous commercial off-the-shelf components poses challenging combinatorial problems. While individual components have typically been well tested in isolation, their interaction with other components typically has not. Yet complex systems with numerous components, each having many available implementations, cannot be tested exhaustively as a result of the combinatorial explosion of the number of systems that could in principle be composed from the available components. In the absence of information about erroneous interactions that might occur, software interaction testing proposes that tests be designed to ensure that, for every subset of t components, and for every available implementation of each component in this subset, there is at least one test in which these t components are instantiated by the chosen implementations. The combinatorial design that underlies such software interaction tests is the covering array, a natural generalization of orthogonal arrays. Numerous open problems on covering arrays are of interest; we focus on combinatorial and algorithmic questions concerning their construction.

 

 

12th Annual Conference of the Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics (FIM XII)