Automated test design for boundaries of product line variants

Abstract

Developing product lines is usually more efficient than developing single products because of the reuse of single components. Testing, however, has to consider complete, integrated systems. To prevent testing every product on system level, the whole product line should be analyzed with the aim of selecting distinguishing product behavior and a minimum of system products to test. In this paper, we present a model-based test design approach for testing the selected behavior of products, but also their deselected behavior. A major challenge of this approach is that the deselected behavior of a product is often not part of its behavioral model. Thus, we use the variability model to transform the behavioral model so that showing the exclusion of the deselected behavior is also covered by tests. We present the approach, a corresponding prototypical implementation, and our experiences using a set of examples.