Product Line Engineering (PLE) has become a major topic in industrial software development and many organizations have started to consider PLE as state-of-practice. One topic that needs greater emphasis is testing of product lines. Product line testing is crucial to the successful establishment of PLE technology in an organization. The workshop aims at addressing some of the open fundamental challenges of testing in a PLE setting. Given the improvements in productivity that PLE delivers to development, how does a test organization keep pace? To what extent can we test reusable assets and how much can this reduce the testing obligations for each product? What properties of a product line architecture improve the testability of reusable assets and products and how can these be enforced during architectural design? Are there PLE techniques that can provide similar efficiency gains for testing as are possible for development? Without adequate answers, testing becomes the bottleneck in PLE.

We aim at bringing together both researchers and practitioners from testing and product line engineering on all aspects of product line testing, from designing for testability, through test coverage, to testing tools. We are especially interested in exchanging industrial experience in product line testing and comparing different approaches to enable an integration of different ideas. In this year's workshop the focus will be on strategies to evolve product line architectures towards more testability and to align the test strategy with the architecture.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Testability patterns (architecture/design patterns & idioms for assuring testability) & anti-patterns
• Strategies to evolve product line architectures towards more testability and to align the test strategy with the architecture
• Test case design and test case generation for product lines
• Metrics and guidelines for component testability, test coverage, and test effectiveness in the context of software product lines
• Test-driven design in a product line context
• Minimizing redundant testing across product line members
• Test automation and testing tools
• Traceability issues from requirements to test cases
• Cost/benefit of core asset unit testing versus product integration testing

Paper Submission: See the Submission page for details and guidelines for submitting a position paper.

A PDF copy of the SPLiT 2006 Call for Papers flyer is available for download here.

Workshop attendance is open to everyone interested in the topic. See the registration page for details.

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