Goal-oriented test case selection and prioritization for product line feature models

The software product line engineering paradigm is amongst the widely used means for capturing and handling the commonalities and variabilities of the many applications of a target domain. The large number of possible products and complex interactions between software product line features makes the effective testing of them a challenge. To conquer the time and space complexity involved with testing a product line, an intuitive approach is the reduction of the test space. In this paper, we propose an approach to reduce the product line test space. We introduce a goal-oriented approach for the selection of the most desirable features from the product line. Such an approach allows us to identify the features that are more important and need to be tested more comprehensively from the perspective of the domain stakeholders. The more important features and the configurations that contain them will be given priority over the less important configurations, hence providing a hybrid test case reduction and prioritization strategy for testing software product lines.