A Systematic Product Line Test Derivation from Activity Diagrams

The state of the art software product line testing methods attempted test derivation from product lines modeled as activity diagrams (ADs) with the test coverage goals of control flow and data flow. However, the existing methods applied widely different approaches to closely related problems with the consequence that the user of the methods cannot easily see the essence of product line test derivation. Moreover, the existing methods have no solution for P-use test derivation for data flow testing. This paper views this status as the result of not suitably handling variability modeling and binding formation and application and proposes a method that addresses these issues. This is done by introducing an explicit notation for product line AD, which makes clear the distinction between platform AD and product AD, and also by explicitly forming test artifact bindings for products and applying them at suitable steps in the test cases derivation paths.