(NIST: Gaithersburg, Maryland) -- A team of computer scientists and mathematicians from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Texas, Arlington, is developing an open-source tool that catches programming errors by using an emerging approach called “combinatorial testing.” The NIST-Texas tool could save software developers significant time and money.

Studying software crashes in a variety of applications from medical devices to Web browsers, NIST researchers obtained hard evidence to support long-held conventional wisdom that most software failures result from simple events rather than complex ones. Even for Web browsers containing hundreds of different variables, most failures were caused by interactions between just two variables. In the applications that the researchers studied, additional failures could result from interactions of up to six variables.

Based on that insight, the NIST-Texas team went beyond the popular practice of “pairwise testing,” or exploring interactions between only two variables at a time, and designed a method for efficiently testing different combinations of settings in up to at least six interacting variables at a time. Their technique resembles combinatorial chemistry in which scientists screen multiple chemical compounds simultaneously rather than one at a time.

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