Model-based generation of test scripts across product variants : An experience report from the railway industry

• 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.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Social och ekonomisk geografi -- Kulturgeografi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Social and Economic Geography -- Human Geography (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

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

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)