SPLiT – Workshop on Software Product Line Testing

Abstract

Product line engineering (PLE) has become a major topic in industrial software development, and many organizations have started to consider PLE as state of the practice. One topic that needs greater emphasis is testing of product lines. Product line testing is crucial to the successful establishment of PLE technology in an organization. The workshop aims at addressing some of the open fundamental challenges of testing in a PLE setting. How can we manage the complexity of the test space? Can we leverage our established testing tools and procedures? A particularly hard challenge for test groups in a PLE setting is keeping pace with development productivity gains. If software developers can create unique product instances 10 times faster using PLE techniques, how does the test organization keep pace without having to hire 10 times as many test engineers? Are there PLE techniques that can provide efficiency gains for testing similar to those for development? These are questions that we have to face when transitioning to PLE, and, without adequate answers, testing becomes the bottleneck in PLE.