Combinatorial testing can be useful not only for large software-related testing efforts. While it seems worthwhile to evaluate its benefits for more general applications, lack of immediate availability of suitable arrays is a major impediment against its wider use by practitioners. This paper discusses requirements for making covering arrays (CAs), a key tool in combinatorial testing, accessible to practitioners of various application areas in a way that satisfies their needs. It is argued that, by fulfilling such requirements, the expert community also improves exchange of results among its members. The paper is thus intended as a call for action for the combinatorial testing community to improve the sharing of CA constructions.

Ulrike Grömping is a statistician and a professor for applied statistics and business mathematics at BHT. She earned her PhD at the Department of Statistics at the University of Dortmund (now Faculty of Statistics at TU Dortmund University). Besides academic activities, she has work experience as a statistician in epidemiological studies as well as in automotive development. Her research interests are industrial design of experiments and variable importance in regression models, and she has authored, and maintains, several R packages around these topics.