A technique for agile and automatic interaction testing for product lines

Abstract

Product line developers must ensure that existing and new features work in all products. Adding to or changing a product line might break some of its features. In this paper, we present a technique for automatic and agile interaction testing for product lines. The technique enables developers to know if features work together with other features in a product line, and it blends well into a process of continuous integration. The technique is evaluated with two industrial applications, testing a product line of safety devices and the Eclipse IDEs. The first case shows how existing test suites are applied to the products of a 2-wise covering array to identify two interaction faults. The second case shows how over 400,000 test executions are performed on the products of a 2-wise covering array using over 40,000 existing automatic tests to identify potential interactions faults. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.