Towards interactive visualization support for pairwise testing software product lines

Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are families of related software products. SPL practices have proven substantial technological and economical benefits such as improved software reuse and reduced time to market. Software testing is a key development activity in SPLs, and it is uniquely challenging because of the usually large number of feature combinations present in typical SPLs. Pairwise testing is a combinatorial testing technique that aims at selecting products to test based on the pairs of feature combinations such products provide. Our previous work on evolutionary approaches for SPL testing and their comparative analysis has yielded a large amount of data that prompted us to explore ways by which to convey and represent this information. In this paper we present our early results in this effort. We describe three basic visualization applications to pairwise testing and highlight some of the open questions that we foresee. But most importantly, our driving goal is both to raise the awareness of the visualization problems in this area and to spark the interest of the software visualization community.