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PLeTs: A Software Product Line for Testing Tools

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UML-Based Software Product Line Engineering with SMarty

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Abstract

Software testing is a fundamental activity to improve software quality. However, software testing is one of the most time-consuming and expensive activities of the software development process. Therefore, several testing tools have already been developed to support software testing, including tools for model-based testing (MBT), which is a testing technique to automatically generate testing artifacts from the system model. Some of the advantages of MBT include lower cost and less effort to generate test cases. Therefore, in the last years, a diversity of commercial, academic, and open-source tools to support MBT has been developed to better explore these advantages. Although several testing tools to support MBT were produced in the past years, most of them have been individually and independently developed based on a single architecture. Therefore, it is difficult to integrate, evolve, maintain, and reuse them. One strategy that could minimize those problems would be to use software product lines (SPL), which allows to systematically generating software products at lower costs, in a shorter time, and with higher quality. Therefore, this chapter presents an SPL for testing tools that support MBT (PLeTs (This chapter is an expanded version of previously published paper Rodrigues et al. (PLeTs - Test Automation using Software Product Lines and Model-Based Testing. In: Proceedings of the 22th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, pp. 483–488, 2010.))) and how we applied the Stereotype-based Management of Variability (SMarty) approach to manage and resolve the dependencies among components and to represent the variability in PLeTs architecture. PLeTs is a component-based SPL developed to automatically generate MBT tools. The PLeTs MBT tools aim to automate any of the test activities of MBT, for example, the generation of test cases and/or test scripts based on the system model. Basically, PLeTs MBT tools receive, as input, a system model, generate the test cases/scripts, execute the test scripts, and then compare the produced results. Since PLeTs can generate tools that connect to any commercial testing tool, a software testing team can incorporate their own testing tools, hence reducing effort and investment. In a nutshell, the main PLeTs goal is to reuse SPL artifacts and use existing testing tools to ease the development of new MBT tools.

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Acknowledgement

This work is partially supported by the Brazilian funding agency CNPq (Grant 306250/2021-7).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Systems, Federal University of Pampa, Alegrete, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Elder M. Rodrigues & Luciano Marchezan

  2. School of Technology, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Avelino F. Zorzo

Authors
  1. Elder M. Rodrigues
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  2. Avelino F. Zorzo
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  3. Luciano Marchezan
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Correspondence to Elder M. Rodrigues .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Informatics Department, State University of Maringá, Maringá, Paraná, Brazil

    Edson OliveiraJr

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Rodrigues, E.M., Zorzo, A.F., Marchezan, L. (2023). PLeTs: A Software Product Line for Testing Tools. In: OliveiraJr, E. (eds) UML-Based Software Product Line Engineering with SMarty. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18556-4_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18556-4_14

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