Software Product Line Testing Based on Feature Model Mutation

The Feature Model (FM) is a fundamental artifact of the Software Product Line (SPL) engineering, used to represent commonalities and variabilities, and also to derive products for testing. However, the test of all features combinations (products) is not always possible in practice. Due to the growing complexity of the applications, only a subset of products is usually selected. The selection is generally based on combinatorial testing, to test features interactions. This kind of selection does not consider different classes of faults that can be present in the FM. The application of a fault-based approach, such as mutation-based testing, can increase the probability of finding faults and the confidence that the SPL products match the requirements. Considering that, this paper introduces a mutation approach to select products for the feature testing of SPLs. The approach can be used similarly to a test criterion in the generation and assessment of test cases. It includes (i) a set of mutation operators, introduced to describe typical faults associated to the feature management and to the FM; and (ii) a testing process to apply the operators. Experimental results show the applicability of the approach. The selected test case sets are capable to reveal other kind of faults, not revealed in the pairwise testing.