Towards an integration testing approach for software product lines

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) involves two development processes, core asset development and product development. From a testing perspective, such a division demands for testing issues to be considered in both processes. Although existing literature include some information on integration testing for SPLE, the usual focus goes to test assets generation, despite other several important issues that a process should assemble, such as guidelines, activities, steps, inputs and outputs, personnel, and division of responsibilities regarding the both SPLE processes. In short, the existing approaches do not present detailed solutions, which can represent an extra effort to apply an existing process into a real context. In this paper, we present a first step in the endeavor described above. In the context of the RiSE Product Line Engineering (RiPLE) framework, we propose an approach for dealing with integration testing in both core asset and product development. We illustrate the approach by the use of a running example, with the goal of explaining every step of our approach.