AnkrPt Pairwise

Generating test data to maximize coverage while minimizing testing, that’s AnkrPt Pairwise. Testing is critical to ensure the quality of your system, but testing effectively is often difficult to do. Pairwise is a testing technique based on the principle that most defects trigger with either a single input parameter or an interaction between pairs of parameters.

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Do More With Less

Coverage matters when it comes to testing; the more you cover, the more confidence you gain in your system. Traditional exploratory or random testing is hit or miss, which typically means more tests but not necessarily better coverage. But what if you could test more with fewer test cases? That’s the promise of pairwise.

Generate Test Data

Test automation software doesn’t normally consider test data; AnkrPt Pairwise fills that gap.

Since it’s impossible to manually create all-pairs tests for any but the most simple scenarios, we must generate them. AnkrPt Pairwise is a testing tool that uses sophisticated processes to ensure 100% coverage of pairs testing while minimizing the tests needed to provide that coverage. This greatly increases the confidence in your system while reducing the effort required to test, thus saving you time and money.

Criteria, Required Tests, Constraints

All pairwise engines accept Criteria to produce tests. Some pairwise engines support Required Tests, letting you force specific interactions to accommodate specific test cases. And Constraints are the trifecta of pairwise testing, letting you eliminate undesirable tests.

Great tools support all three; AnkrPt Pairwise supports all three, and Negative Testing.

What About Negative Testing?

It’s typical to do happy path testing but to fully validate the system you need negative testing as well. That’s the missing piece from most pairwise generators, but not ours!

AnkrPt Pairwise accommodates negative testing and even lets you use negative values for Required Tests and Constraints support. Negative testing, finally ready for prime time.

The ROI

  • Let’s use a simple calculation to show the ROI of reduced testing. Assuming a manual tester’s rate is $30/hour and it takes 10 minutes to run a test, that means it costs $5 to run that test. Running that test once per week will cost $260 per year.

If eliminating just one test saves $260/year, how much can AnkrPt Pairwise save your project? And remember, AnkrPt Pairwise not only reduces your overall test count; it increases your confidence in testing. A clear win-win.

All this for FREE! How?

We care about testing, and test data is part of that process. We found out about pairwise combinatorial testing and were surprised at how little it is used. When we couldn’t find a tool we liked, we developed our own… and are sharing it with the world!

Why free? We thought long and hard about this but ultimately decided that improving testing was more important. If we help one project, cool; helping hundreds of projects, way better; helping thousands of projects would be amazing!

Hopefully AnkrPt Pairwise helps you!

Download and start using it immediately!

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Frequently Asked Questions

Pairwise, or all-pairs, is a testing technique based on the principle that most defects trigger with either a single input parameter or an interaction between pairs of parameters. So pairwise testing is simply the ability to pair all your test criteria into as few tests as possible. Please refer to the AnkrPt Pairwise documentation for more information, and/or read our blog article “Pairwise Testing – Why it Matters“.

Except for the most simple systems, testing every possibility is just not feasible. With even 10 fields containing only a small number of values, a cartesian product of tests results in thousands, millions, or even more, tests. Pairwise is a balance between coverage (90%+) and effort (smallest number of tests).

Most testing is random or exploratory testing, so you’re left guessing if you’ve tested enough or not. Pairwise guarantees all pairs are tested which provides a high degree of confidence in coverage, some say as much as 90% or more. With the ability to add required tests, constraints, and negative tests, that confidence level goes up. Is that enough? Only you can say.

Do the following to generate your first tests:

  1. Double-click the downloaded AnkrPt Pairwise jar file which starts a graphical application.
  2. Download this sample file which includes a complete generation file.
  3. Open the file in AnkrPt Pairwise.
  4. Click Generate.
  5. Open the output file to see your results.

Refer to the AnkrPt Pairwise documentation for more information.

AnkrPt Pairwise is a Java application requiring Java 11 or higher. This means there are a few small steps needed to set it up. Please refer to the AnkrPt Pairwise documentation for more information.

This is likely due to a Windows Registry problem. A simple workaround is to start AnkrPt Pairwise directly from the command line with the following:

javaw pairwise-1.00.RELEASE.jar

To fix the problem, refer to our AnkrPt Pairwise documentation in the FAQ section for how to update your registry.

Yes. You can download this sample file to get started. You can also refer to the AnkrPt Pairwise documentation section titled “Example Files” for several examples of the different structures of a criteria file. Simply copy/paste the criteria into your file. We chose this approach to ensure compatibility regardless of download restrictions.

In its simplest form, you define criteria and generate tests. For complete documentation, go to AnkrPt Pairwise documentation.

You can update to the latest version at any time by simply downloading the latest and moving it to your installation folder. Refer to AnkrPt Pairwise documentation. for complete documentation.

Yes, you can install AnkrPt Pairwise on as many machines as you want.

Yes. We don’t track any personal information but do track basic analytics such as the number of parameters used, the number of tests generated, the time it took to generate, and the memory and processor type of your computer. We use this for performance analytics and to determine how often AnkrPt Pairwise is used. We are also curious how large the test sets are. Refer to our Pairwise blogs for ideas on Why it Matters, Choose Your Data Wisely (coming soon), By The Numbers (coming soon), and more.

You can join us in the AnkrPt Slack, where members of the AnkrPt community can help you with any questions or problems!