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Automated test reuse for highly configurable software

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Abstract

Dealing with highly configurable systems is generally very complex. Researchers and practitioners have conceived hundreds of different analysis techniques to deal with different aspects of configurable systems. One large focal point is the testing of configurable software. This is challenging due to the large number of possible configurations. Moreover, tests themselves are rarely configurable and instead built for specific configurations. However, existing tests need to be adapted to run on a different configuration. In this paper, we report on an experiment about automatically reusing existing tests in configurable systems. We used manually developed tests for specific configurations of three configurable systems and investigated how changing the configuration affects the tests. Subsequently, we employed an approach for automated reuse to generate new test variants (by reusing from existing ones) for combinations of previous configurations and compared their results to the ones from existing tests. Our results showed that we could directly reuse some tests for different configurations. Nonetheless, our automatically generated test variants generally yielded better results. Our generated tests had a higher or equal success rate to the existing tests in most cases. Even in the cases the success rate was equal, our generated tests generally had higher code coverage.

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Notes

  1. https://almworks.com/archive/vbs

  2. https://www.turnkeylinux.org/bugzilla

  3. https://www.seleniumhq.org/

  4. https://maven.apache.org/

  5. https://maven.apache.org/shared/maven-invoker/

  6. https://maven.apache.org/surefire/maven-surefire-plugin/

  7. https://www.eclemma.org/jacoco/

  8. https://pitest.org/

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Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper has been funded by the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT), the Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs (BMDW), and the Province of Upper Austria in the frame of the COMET - Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies Programme managed by Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG. This research was in part funded by the Linz Institute of Technology (LIT) Secure and Correct Systems Lab and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), grant no. P31989.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Competence Center Hagenberg GmbH, Hagenberg, Austria

    Stefan Fischer & Rudolf Ramler

  2. Institute for Software Systems Engineering, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

    Gabriela Karoline Michelon & Alexander Egyed

  3. Institute of Software Engineering and Automotive Informatics, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

    Lukas Linsbauer

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  1. Stefan Fischer
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  2. Gabriela Karoline Michelon
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  4. Lukas Linsbauer
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Correspondence to Stefan Fischer.

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Communicated by: Laurence Duchien, Thomas Thüm and Paul Grünbacher

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Fischer, S., Michelon, G.K., Ramler, R. et al. Automated test reuse for highly configurable software. Empir Software Eng 25, 5295–5332 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-020-09884-x

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