Software Product Line Testing Process

Software Product Lines (SPL) can be considered an efficient approach to intra-organizational reuse of software. It delivers significant economic benefits for organizations, such as reduced cost and improved quality and time-to-market. It is based upon the systematic reuse of artifacts, through exploiting commonalities and managing variabilities among products, that are established under a common architecture. In SPL, special attention regarding quality of produced artifacts is required. In terms of quality assurance, whereas in conventional software development, a program is said validated if we have confidence that it will operate correctly, in SPL it is required to have confidence that any derived instance will operate correctly. Likewise, it also increases the effort required to deal with quality assurance in SPL projects. Providing software with quality is fundamental and perhaps the major practice that organizations should adopt in order to experience the real SPL benefits. This work describes a process to support testing activities in SPL projects. It intends to provide a way for organizations to save effort when performing testing activities in a SPL environment.