Unifying Behavioral and Feature Modeling for Testing of Software Product Lines

Abstract

Existing software product line (SPL) engineering testing approaches generally provide positive testing that validates the SPL’s functionality. Negative testing is commonly neglected. This research aims to unify behavioral and feature models of an SPL, enable testing before and after variability binding for domain-centric and product-centric testing, and combine positive and negative testing for a holistic testing view. This study suggests behavioral modeling with event sequence graphs (ESGs). This heterogeneous modeling strategy supports bottom-up domain testing and top-down product testing with the feature model. This new feature-oriented ESG test creation method generates shorter test sequences than the original ESG optimum test sequences. Statechart and original ESG test-generating methods are compared. Positive testing findings are similar. The Statechart technique generated 12 test cases with 59 events, whereas the ESG technique created six test cases with 60 events. The ESG technique generated 205 negative test cases with 858 events with the Test Suite Designer tool. However, the Conformiq Designer tool for the Statechart technique does not have a negative test case generation capability. It is shown that the proposed ESG-based holistic approach confirms not only the desirable (positive) properties but also the undesirable (negative) ones. As an additional research, the traditional ESG test-generating approach is compared to the new feature-oriented method on six SPLs of different sizes and features. Our case study results show that the traditional ESG test generation approach demonstrated higher positive test generation scores compare to the proposed feature-oriented test generation approach. However, our proposed feature-oriented test generation approach is capable of generating shorter test sequences, which could be beneficial for reducing the execution time of test cases compared to traditional ESG approach. Finally, our case study has also shown that regardless of the test generation approach, there has been found no significant difference between the Bottom-up and Top-down test strategies with respect to their positive test generation scores.