Poster: Re-Testing Configured Instances in the Production Environment - A Method for Reducing the Test Suite

Abstract

Configurations play an important role in the behavior and operation of configurable systems. Prior to deployment a configured system is tested in the development environment. However, because of the differences between the development environment and the production environment, the configuration of the system needs to be adapted for the production environment. It is therefore important to re-test the configured system in the production environment. Since the system has already been tested in the development environment one should avoid reapplying all the test cases, it is desirable to reduce the test suite to be used in the production environment as much as possible. This is the goal of the method we propose in this paper. For this, we explore the similarities between the configuration used in the development environment and the configuration for the production environment to eliminate test cases. Indeed, the difference between the two configurations is only at the environment level, i.e. only the configuration parameters that influence the interactions between the system and its environment are changed for the deployment in the production environment. We propose a method that is based on a classification of the configuration parameters (based on their dependency to the environment) and use it to reduce the development time test suite before reapplying it in the production environment.