SMartyTesting: A Model-Based Testing Approach for Deriving Software Product Line Test Sequences

Code reuse and testing approaches to ensure and to increase productivity and quality in software development has grown considerably among process models in recent decades. Software Product Line (SPL) is a technique in which non-opportunistic reuse is the core of its development process. Given the inherent variability in products derived from an SPL, an effective way to ensure the quality of such products is to use testing techniques, which take into account SPL variability in all stages. There are several approaches for SPL variability management, especially those based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The SMarty approach provides users identification and representation of variability in UML models using stereotypes and tagged-values. SMarty currently offers a verification technique for its models, such as sequence diagrams, in the form of checklist-based inspections. However, SMarty does not provide a way to validate models using, for example, Model-Based Testing (MBT). Thus, this paper presents SMartyTesting, an approach to assist the generation of test sequences from SMarty sequence diagrams. To evaluate the feasibility of such an approach, we performed an empirical comparative study with an existing SPL MBT approach (SPLiT-MBt) using activity diagrams, taking into account two criteria: sequence differentiation, and number of sequences generated. Results indicate that SMartyTesting is feasible for generating test sequences from SMarty sequence diagrams. Preliminary evidence relies on generating more test sequences using sequence diagrams than activity diagrams, thus potentially increasing SPL coverage.