Applying incremental model slicing to product-line regression testing

Abstract

One crucial activity in software product line (SPL) testing is the detection of erroneous artifact interactions when combined for a variant. This detection is similar to the retest test-case selection problem in regression testing, where change impact analysis is applied to reason about changed dependencies to be retested. In this paper, we propose automated change impact analysis based on incremental model slicing for incremental SPL testing. Incremental slicing allows for a slice computation by adapting a previous slice with explicit derivation of their differences by taking model changes into account. We apply incremental slicing to determine the impact of applied model changes and to reason about their potential retest. Based on our novel retest coverage criterion, each slice change specifies a retest test goal to be covered by existing test cases selected for retesting. We prototypically implemented our approach and evaluated its applicability and effectiveness by means of four SPLs.