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Evolutionary Computation for Software Product Line Testing: An Overview and Open Challenges

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Abstract

Because of economical, technological and marketing reasons today’s software systems are more frequently being built as families where each product variant implements a different combination of features. Software families are commonly called Software Product Lines (SPLs) and over the past three decades have been the subject of extensive research and application. Among the benefits of SPLs are: increased software reuse, faster and easier product customization, and reduced time to market. However, testing SPLs is specially challenging as the number of product variants is usually large making it infeasible to test every single variant. In recent years there has been an increasing interest in applying evolutionary computation techniques for SPL testing. In this chapter, we provide a concise overview of the state of the art and practice in SPL testing with evolutionary techniques as well as to highlight open questions and areas for future research.

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Notes

  1. 1.
  2. 2.

    An early version is available in [24].

  3. 3.

    Definitions based on [12,25].

  4. 4.

    In [30] the algorithm is named PGS. We changed its name for this chapter to avoid confusions with the original algorithm PGS in [27] that was not designed for SPLs.

  5. 5.

    For notational brevity we omit on the vector function and the objective vectors theT that denotes the transpose on vectors.

  6. 6.
  7. 7.

    An early version is available in [24].

  8. 8.
  9. 9.

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Acknowledgments

This research is partially funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) projects P 25513-N15, P 25289-N15, and Lise Meitner Fellowship M1421-N15, and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER under contract TIN2011-28194 and fellowship BES-2012-055967. It is also partially founded by projects 8.06/5.47.4142 (collaboration with the VSB-Tech. Univ. of Ostrava) and 8.06/5.47.4356 (Andalusian Agency of Public Works).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Systems Engineering Institute, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

    Roberto E. Lopez-Herrejon & Alexander Egyed

  2. Universidad de Málaga, Andalucía Tech, Sevilla, Spain

    Javier Ferrer, Francisco Chicano & Enrique Alba

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  1. Roberto E. Lopez-Herrejon

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  2. Javier Ferrer

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  3. Francisco Chicano

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Correspondence toRoberto E. Lopez-Herrejon.

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  1. Department of Electrical and Computer En, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

    Witold Pedrycz

  2. Innopolis University, Bolzano, Italy

    Giancarlo Succi

  3. Center for Applied Software Engineering, Bolzano, Italy

    Alberto Sillitti

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Lopez-Herrejon, R.E., Ferrer, J., Chicano, F., Egyed, A., Alba, E. (2016). Evolutionary Computation for Software Product Line Testing: An Overview and Open Challenges. In: Pedrycz, W., Succi, G., Sillitti, A. (eds) Computational Intelligence and Quantitative Software Engineering. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 617. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25964-2_4

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