Automated Code-Based Test Selection for Software Product Line Regression Testing

Regression testing for software product line (SPL) is challenging and can be expensive because it must ensure that all the products of a product family are correct whenever changes are made. SPL regression testing can be made efficient by selecting only the test cases that are relevant to the changes. In the past, some approaches for SPL test case selection have been proposed. However, they require requirements specification, architecture and/or traceabilities for test cases that are well managed for selecting test cases for a retest. In this paper, we propose an automated method of source code-based regression test selection for SPLs that selects regression tests, based on the commonality and variability of a product family while leaving out the test cases not affected by the changes to the source code. Preliminary evaluation of our method using five product lines shows that our method reduces without missing any fault-revealing test cases the number of test cases for a retest by 22.4%, 13.4% and 20.4%, on average, compared to, respectively, the retest-all method, the random selection method and the complete selection method.