Strategies for testing products in software product lines

Abstract

The software product line engineering strategy enables the achievement of significant improvements in quality through reuse of carefully crafted software assets across multiple products. However, high levels of quality in the software product line assets, which are used to create products, must be accompanied by effective and efficient test strategies for the products in the software product line. The goal of this study is to understand which strategies for testing products in software product lines have been reported in the literature, enabling discussions on the significant issues, and also pointing out further research directions. A systematic literature review was carried out that identified two hundred seventy-three papers, published from the years 1998 and early in 2012. From such a set of papers, a systematic selection resulted in forty-one relevant papers. The analysis of the reported strategies comprised two important aspects: the selection of products for testing, and the actual test of products. The findings showed a range of strategies, dealing with both aspects, but few empirical evaluations of their effectiveness have been performed, which limits the inferences that can be drawn.