Efficient regression testing of software product lines by reducing redundant test executions

Regression testing for software product lines (SPLs) is challenging because it must ensure that all the products of a product family work correctly whenever changes are made. One approach to reducing the cost of regression testing is the regression test selection (RTS), which selects a subset of regression test cases. However, even when RTS is applied, SPL regression testing can still be expensive because, in the product line context, each test case can be executed on more than one product that reuses the test case, which would typically result in a large number of test executions. A promising direction is to eliminate redundant test executions of test cases. We propose a method that, given a test case, identifies a set of products, on which the test case will cover the same sequence of source code statements and produce the same testing results, and then excludes these products from products to apply the test case to. The evaluation results showed that when the full selection approach and the approach of repetitively applying an RTS method for a single software system are used for test selection, our method reduced, respectively, 59.3% and 40.0% of the numbers of test executions of the approaches.