Delta-oriented test case prioritization for integration testing of software product lines

Abstract

Software product lines have potential to allow for mass customization of products. Unfortunately, the resulting, vast amount of possible product variants with commonalities and differences leads to new challenges in software testing. Ideally, every product variant should be tested, especially in safety-critical systems. However, due to the exponentially increasing number of product variants, testing every product variant is not feasible. Thus, new concepts and techniques are required to provide efficient SPL testing strategies exploiting the commonalities of software artifacts between product variants to reduce redundancy in testing. In this paper, we present an efficient integration testing approach for SPLs based on delta modeling. We focus on test case prioritization. As a result, only the most important test cases for every product variant are tested, reducing the number of executed test cases significantly, as testing can stop at any given point because of resource constraints while ensuring that the most important test cases have been covered. We present the general concept and our evaluation results. The results show a measurable reduction of executed test cases compared to single-software testing approaches.