Eliminating Products to Test in a Software Product Line (Short Paper)

A Software Product Line (SPL) is a family of programs. Testing an SPL is a challenge because the number of programs to examine may be exponential in the number of features. However, there are features whose absence or presence has no bearing on the outcome of a test. We can ignore such irrelevant features and consider combinations of only the remaining features, thereby eliminating unnecessary test runs. In this paper, we propose a product line representation that enables a conventional static program analysis to be applied. We then present a classification of features that can be used to narrow down the search for relevant features. Conditions of relevance that a static analysis can check are outlined and a procedure that uses the set of relevant features to reduce the combinatorial number of programs to test is sketched.