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. How can we manage the complexity of the test space? Can we leverage our established testing tools and procedures? A particularly hard challenge for test groups in a PLE setting is keeping pace with development productivity gains. If software developers can create unique product instances 10 times faster using PLE techniques, how does the test organization keep pace without having to hire 10 times as many test engineers? Are there PLE techniques that can provide similar efficiency gains for testing as is possible for development? Without adequate answers, testing becomes the bottleneck in PLE.

In this workshop we aim at bringing together both researchers and practitioners from testing and product-line engineering on all aspects of PL testing, from designing test cases with variation points over test coverage to testing tools. We are especially interested in new ideas on techniques and tools to improve efficiency of product line testing or to reduce its costs. Our goal is to provide an opportunity to discuss innovative ideas, setting a research agenda, and starting collaborations on this topic.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Techniques for strategic reduction in test time, test cost, and test flaws
• Supporting variation points in test cases
• Test case design techniques and test case generation for product lines
• Definition and measurement of test coverage and test effectiveness in the context of software product lines
• Minimizing redundant testing across a collection of similar products
• Reuse vs. coverage measurements for testing software product lines
• Test automation and testing tools
• Performance and reliability testing for product lines
• Traceability issues from requirements to test cases

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

A PDF copy of the SPLiT 2007 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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