Automated Reuse of Test Cases for Highly Configurable Software Systems

In this work, we report about our research results initially published in the journal Empirical Software Engineering, volume 25, issue 6, pp. 5295–5332, November 2020, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-020-09884-x. We performed experiments on test reusability across configurations of highly configurable software systems. First, we used manually written tests for specific configurations of three configurable systems and investigated how changing configuration options affects these tests. Subsequently, we applied an approach developed for automated reuse, ECCO (Extraction and Composition for Clone-and-Own), to automatically generate tests for new configurations from the existing, manually written tests. The experiments showed that our generated tests had a higher or equal success rate compared to direct reuse and they generally achieved a higher code coverage. It can be concluded that automating the reuse of tests for configurable software can substantially reduce the effort for adapting existing tests and it supports a rigorous testing process.