On Monday April 20th 2015, Shuai Wang defended his PhD thesis “Systematic Product Line Testing: Methodologies, Automation, and Industrial Application”. The defense took place at 13:15, Stortua, Simula Research Laboratory, Martin Linges vei 17, Fornebu.

Testing products in a cost-efficient way remains an attractive topic for product line testing in both academia and industry, which can be addressed by employing systematic and automated approaches utilizing models such as feature models. Driven by the needs of our industrial problem for testing Video Conferencing Systems (VCSs) product line developed by Cisco Systems, Norway, cost-effective testing can be further formulated into four main problems, including: 1) Test Selection: Automatically and systemically select a set of relevant test cases for a product from the entire suite available for a product line; 2) Test Minimization: Minimizing the test suite obtained by the selection to eliminate redundant test cases for reducing the cost of testing (e.g., execution time) while preserving high effectiveness (e.g., fault detection capability); 3) Test Generation: Automatically and systemically generate test cases when new functionalities are introduced to the product line by the product; and 4) Test Prioritization: Prioritizing the minimized test suite with the aim at balancing the trade-off between cost and effectiveness.

To tackle the above-mentioned four challenges, this thesis presents a set of methodologies on industrial systems for cost-effective testing of a product in a product line, namely Product Line Model-based Testing Methodologies (PL-MTM), which includes: 1) a systematic and automated test selection methodology using feature model; 2) an automated search-based test minimization approach together; 3) an automated and systematic methodology using feature model to support model-based test generation; and 4) an automated search-based test prioritization approach. The results of empirical evaluation show that the proposed methodologies are cost-effective as compared with the current practice.

The thesis is written within the field of Software engineering. The work has been conducted at Simula Research Laboratory.

Prior to the defense, at 10:15, Shuai Wang presented his trial lecture “Dynamic Software Product Lines”.

The adjudication committee
•    Professor Laurence Duchien, Universite Lille I, France
•    Professor Enrique Alba, University of Malaga, Spain
•    Associate Professor Yan Zhang, University of Oslo, Simula Research Laboratory

Chair of the disputation
•    Professor Fritz Albregtsen, University of Oslo

Supervisors
•    Shaukat Ali, Simula Research Laboratory
•    Arnaud Gotlieb, Simula Research Laboratory
•    Magne Jørgensen, Simula Research Laboratory