Plets : a product line of model-based testing tools

Abstract

Software testing is recognized as a fundamental activity for assuring software quality. Furthermore, testing is also recognized as one of the most time consuming and expensive activities of software development process. A diversity of testing tools has been developed to support this activity, including tools for Model-based Testing (MBT). MBT is a testing technique to automate the generation of testing artifacts from the system model. This technique presents several advantages, such as, 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. In spite of the diversity of tools to support MBT, most of them have been individually and independently developed from scratch based on a single architecture. Thus, they face difficulties of integration, evolution, maintenance, and reuse. In another perspective, Software Product Lines (SPL) offers possibility of systematically generating software products at lower costs, in shorter time, and with higher quality. The main contribution of this Ph.D thesis is to present a SPL for testing tools that support MBT (PLeTs) and an automated environment to support the generation of these tools (PlugSPL). Furthermore, our strategy was initially applied to generate some MBT testing tools which were applied in two examples of use performed in collaboration of an IT company. Based on the feedback from the examples of use we can infer that SPL can be considered a relevant approach to improve productivity and reuse during generation of MBT testing tools. Moreover, we also performed an experimental study carried out to evaluate the effort to use an MBT tool derived from our SPL to generate test scripts and scenarios. Thus, the results point out that the effort to generate test scripts, when compared with a Capture and Replay based tool, was reduced considerably.