Modeling Dependable Product-Families: From Use Cases to State Machine Models

Product Families are gaining interest because of the increasing demand for customizable products. However, testing a Product Family is a difficult task, in special, for dependable products, in which the exception handling must also be well tested. Model-based testing (MBT) can be useful for testing Product Families, in which a behavior model can be obtained from the requirements, this model being used for automatic test case generation. The use of MBT, however, requires a good modeling expertise from practitioners, as they are mainly used with informal, textual descriptions of the requirements. In this paper, we show how to apply a use-case modeling approach that allows the automatic extraction of a state machine model for a product. Use cases are described in a restricted format that comprises not only the representation of commonalities and variabilities but also the specification of exception handling for fault-tolerant behavior.