Building Reusable Testing Assets for a Software Product Line

Summary form only given. Testing consumes a significant percentage of the resources required to produce software intensive products. The exact impact on the project is often hard to evaluate because testing activities are distributed over the entire scope of the development effort. In this article we take a comprehensive end-to-end view of the testing activities and roles that should be present in a software product line organization. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) identifies three areas of responsibility in a product line organization we relate these to testing: organizational managers have responsibility for establishing the test strategy for the organization in general and the product line in particular. These activities are directly related to the business goals and scope of the product line. Technical managers have responsibility for planning the numerous test activities needed to implement the test strategy. These activities are planned in concert with the development activities to coordinate milestones and resources. Software engineers have responsibility for implementing the planned activities. They select the specific test cases necessary to achieve specific test coverage levels and implement any software needed to apply the test cases to the software under test.