Model-based generation of test scripts across product variants: An experience report from the railway industryShow others and affiliations
2022 (English)In: Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, ISSN 2047-7473, E-ISSN 2047-7481, Vol. 34, no 11, article id e2498Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Software product line engineering emerged as an effective approach for the development of families of software-intensive systems in several industries. Although its use has been widely discussed and researched, there are still several open challenges for its industrial adoption and application. One of these is how to efficiently develop and reuse shared software artifacts, which have dependencies on the underlying electrical and hardware systems of products in a family. In this work, we report on our experience in tackling such a challenge in the railway industry and present a model-based approach for the automatic generation of test scripts for product variants in software product lines. The proposed approach is the result of an effort leveraging the experiences and results from the technology transfer activities with our industrial partner Alstom SA in Sweden. We applied and evaluated the proposed approach on the Aventra software product line from Alstom SA. The evaluation showed that the proposed approach mitigates the development effort, development time, and consistency drawbacks associated with the traditional, manual creation of test scripts. We performed an online survey involving 37 engineers from Alstom SA for collecting feedback on the approach. The result of the survey further confirms the aforementioned benefits. © 2022 The Authors.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
John Wiley and Sons Ltd , 2022. Vol. 34, no 11, article id e2498
Keywords [en]
automation, model-based software engineering, product line engineering, testing, Computer software reusability, Railroads, Software design, Software testing, Technology transfer, Experience report, Model-based OPC, Product variants, Railway industry, Software Evolution, Software process, Software Product Line, Test scripts, Surveys
National Category
Human Geography
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-60070DOI: 10.1002/smr.2498Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85135404407OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-60070DiVA, id: diva2:1692878
Note
Funding details: VINNOVA; Funding details: Stiftelsen för Kunskaps- och Kompetensutveckling, KKS; Funding text 1: The work in this paper is supported by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation (KKS), through the project A‐CPS, and by the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA), through the projects PANORAMA and XIVT. The authors would like to thank the Aventra integration team for the availability and the insightful discussions.
2022-09-052022-09-052023-10-04Bibliographically approved