Software product line testing: A feature oriented approach

Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are not intended to create one application, but a number of them: a product family. In contrast to one-off development, SPLs are based on the idea that the distinct products of the family share a significant amount of assets. This forces a change in how software is developed. Likewise, software testing should mimic its code counterpart: product testing should also be produced out of a common set of assets. Specifically, this paper addresses how model-driven testing, used for one-off development, can be moved to an SPL setting. We focus on feature-oriented software development as the SPL realization technique. UML sequence diagrams are used to represent the common and feature scenarios. This models are transformed through model transformations to obtain test cases that conform to the UML Testing Profile.