Risk based testing for software product line engineering

The variability of product lines increases over time thereby leading to an increasing effort for testing. Since the available time for test activities is limited an efficiency improvement is needed to ensure that products have sufficient quality. This paper introduces risk-based testing for software product lines. Our approach is based on risk based testing for single system engineering which is extended with a dimension that captures the percentage of product variants that use a particular development artifact. Based on the risk of development artifacts, the priorities for domain and application engineering are determined. We demonstrate our approach using a case study from an existing product line and discuss tool support. We conclude that the basic ideas behind risk-based testing for product lines are intuitive, pragmatic in nature, and provide the means for practitioners for guiding the test effort.