Reusing Automated Regression Tests for Multiple Variants of a Software Product Line

The high number of possible variants of software product lines raises a considerable practical challenge in testing. In this paper we report our experience with a simple approach that reuses existing automated system tests of a specific product variant to increase the coverage of new variants with little extra effort. The approach has been developed and applied for a software product line in a mechanical engineering company. The existing 300 automated regression tests have been reused on ten new product variants. The results showed that the proposed approach successfully accomplished to increase the test coverage.