Spinal Test Suites for Software Product Lines
This work addresses efficiency issues in testing for software product line developers, presenting an incremental improvement over existing conformance testing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of efficient testing for software product lines by introducing spinal test suites, which avoid retesting common behavior across similar products, resulting in reduced testing effort compared to individual product testing.
A major challenge in testing software product lines is efficiency. In particular, testing a product line should take less effort than testing each and every product individually. We address this issue in the context of input-output conformance testing, which is a formal theory of model-based testing. We extend the notion of conformance testing on input-output featured transition systems with the novel concept of spinal test suites. We show how this concept dispenses with retesting the common behavior among different, but similar, products of a software product line.