Software changes in factory automation: Towards automatic change based regression testing

Changes of software in factory automation are frequent and resource-consuming in quality assurance when proving compliance with functional specifications. Automated testing can help minimizing required resources for software engineering. However, changes in the software cause a need for re-evaluating functionality through tests. To reduce resource consumption, existing relevant tests can be re-executed after ensuring their compatibility with the software after the changes. In this paper, an approach for enabling the automatic identification and classification of changes is presented, which can be used to efficiently select existing and help adapting incompatible test cases, leading to an overall increase in test efficiency. The approach is based on a detailed Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) program library and code analysis (both in IEC 61131-3) for several types of machines of industrial companies from the domain of factory automation.