An Investigative Study of Testing Strategy and Test Case Creation in a Hardware-Software Co-design Environment Using Software Product Line Theory

Abstract: The requirements for software products have increased in recent years. This is both due to more complex technology as well as more requirements from the customers. An approach to solve this issue is by using a software product line (SPL) where reusable assets are developed to produce more tailor-made products with reduced time to market. When creating reusable assets, one also wants to reuse the tests for them. In order to do that, it is important to understand what to test, and where to test. A good test strategy is thereby crucial in order to avoid testing becoming a bottleneck for efficient software development. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how to create a good testing strategy for products in an SPL. This was done by collecting information about the current testing process in order to understand which requirements that exist and how they are addressed. The core foundation of an SPL is to utilize variation to create new products. To understand the existing variation of the product and the test cases a feature modeling and similarity analysis was done. The result from them made it possible to create a test strategy and categorization of test cases that can be used to ease the reuse of test cases for new variants of the product. The resulting test strategy presented proposes feature modeling as the basis of test creation and categorization as a tool to enable easier reuse of test cases. The results of the study indicate that using SPL theory in testing can introduce a better test strategy and test case creation process which is beneficial for the whole development process.