Making testing product lines more efficient by improving the testability of product line architectures

Abstract

Product line engineering is a recent approach to software development that has shown to enable organizations to achieve significant reductions in development and maintenance cost as well as time-to-market of increasingly complex software systems. Yet, the testing process has not kept up with these reductions and the relative cost for testing product lines is actually becoming higher than in traditional single system development. Also, testing often cannot keep pace with accelerated development in product line engineering due to technical and organizational issues. This paper advocates that testing of product lines can be made more efficient and effective by considering testability already during architectural design. It explores the relationship between testability and product line architecture and discusses the importance of high testability for reducing product line testing effort and achieving required coverage criteria. The paper also outlines a systematic approach that will support product line organizations in improving and evaluating testability of product lines at the architectural level.