Featured event sequence graphs for model-based incremental testing of software product lines

Abstract

The goal of software product lines (SPLs) is rapid development of high-quality software products in a specific domain with cost minimization. To assure quality of software products from SPLs, products need to be tested systematically. However, testing every product variant in isolation is generally not feasible for large number of product variants. An approach to deal with this issue is to use incremental testing, where test artifacts that are developed for one product are reused for another product which can be obtained by incrementally adding features to the prior product. We propose a novel model-based test generation approach for products developed using SPL that follows incremental testing paradigm. First, we introduce Featured Event Sequence Graphs (FESGs), an extension of ESGs, that provide necessary definitions and operations to support commonalities and variabilities in SPLs with respect to test models. Then we propose a test generation technique for the product variants of an SPL, which starts from any product. The proposed technique with FESGs avoids redundant test generation for each product from SPL. We compare our technique with in-isolation testing approach by a case study.