Automated Software Testing of Ventilation Equipment

In product development, testing is a vital process to ensure the product’s quality. Testing takes a lot of time and resources to be effective. Usually, these are all repetitive tasks and are prone to mistakes. Automation can be a solution for these problems. Automating tests can be resource heavy activity, so planning it is necessary to ensure its success. Automation is not a silver bullet because not everything could or should be automated. In this thesis, manually executed equipment tests are automated. Designing these automated tests takes precedence over the implementation. The focus in on three devices that belong to a company called FläktGroup. One of the company’s business areas is the development and testing of ventilation and fire safety equipment. The company is interested in automating these devices’ tests. First, a literature review of software and hardware testing and test automation was conducted to understand testing process and automating tests. A review of the equipment and their current tests was conducted to get a better understanding of them. After this, the tests were analysed to detect their possibilities and limitations for automation. These two steps included inspecting the equipment, reviewing their technical data, and interviewing testers. From collected information new automated tests were designed. This included studying previously used and completely new resources. Only one devices’ automated tests were implemented. Some steps in test process could not be automated due to the technical and time limits. The results consist of a few design options for test automation. Designs for two devices gave promising results. Each design option was different in terms of used software. The wide range of software options allows comparison for the designs, and thus the best solution can be picked for each device. Some designs use same resources as in manual tests, but increasing automation requires new software. Improvements were gathered for testing process and new tests. These include software upgrades and documentation. Overall, the results gave a good start for test automation

Modellbasiertes Regressionstesten von Varianten und Variantenversionen

The quality assurance of software product lines (SPL) achieved via testing is a crucial and challenging activity of SPL engineering. In general, the application of single-software testing techniques for SPL testing is not practical as it leads to the individual testing of a potentially vast number of variants. Testing each variant in isolation further results in redundant testing processes by means of redundant test-case executions due to the shared commonality. Existing techniques for SPL testing cope with those challenges, e.g., by identifying samples of variants to be tested. However, each variant is still tested separately without taking the explicit knowledge about the shared commonality and variability into account to reduce the overall testing effort. Furthermore, due to the increasing longevity of software systems, their development has to face software evolution. Hence, quality assurance has also to be ensured after SPL evolution by testing respective versions of variants. In this thesis, we tackle the challenges of testing redundancy as well as evolution by proposing a framework for model-based regression testing of evolving SPLs. The framework facilitates efficient incremental testing of variants and versions of variants by exploiting the commonality and reuse potential of test artifacts and test results. Our contribution is divided into three parts. First, we propose a test-modeling formalism capturing the variability and version information of evolving SPLs in an integrated fashion. The formalism builds the basis for automatic derivation of reusable test cases and for the application of change impact analysis to guide retest test selection. Second, we introduce two techniques for incremental change impact analysis to identify (1) changing execution dependencies to be retested between subsequently tested variants and versions of variants, and (2) the impact of an evolution step to the variant set in terms of modified, new and unchanged versions of variants. Third, we define a coverage-driven retest test selection based on a new retest coverage criterion that incorporates the results of the change impact analysis. The retest test selection facilitates the reduction of redundantly executed test cases during incremental testing of variants and versions of variants. The framework is prototypically implemented and evaluated by means of three evolving SPLs showing that it achieves a reduction of the overall effort for testing evolving SPLs.Testen ist ein wichtiger Bestandteil der Entwicklung von Softwareproduktlinien (SPL). Aufgrund der potentiell sehr großen Anzahl an Varianten einer SPL ist deren individueller Test im Allgemeinen nicht praktikabel und resultiert zudem in redundanten Testfallausführungen, die durch die Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen Varianten entstehen. Existierende SPL-Testansätze adressieren diese Herausforderungen z.B. durch die Reduktion der Anzahl an zu testenden Varianten. Jedoch wird weiterhin jede Variante unabhängig getestet, ohne dabei das Wissen über Gemeinsamkeiten und Variabilität auszunutzen, um den Testaufwand zu reduzieren. Des Weiteren muss sich die SPL-Entwicklung mit der Evolution von Software auseinandersetzen. Dies birgt weitere Herausforderungen für das SPL-Testen, da nicht nur für Varianten sondern auch für ihre Versionen die Qualität sichergestellt werden muss. In dieser Arbeit stellen wir ein Framework für das modellbasierte Regressionstesten von evolvierenden SPL vor, das die Herausforderungen des redundanten Testens und der Software-Evolution adressiert. Das Framework vereint Testmodellierung, Änderungsauswirkungsanalyse und automatische Testfallselektion, um einen inkrementellen Testprozess zu definieren, der Varianten und Variantenversionen unter Ausnutzung des Wissens über gemeinsame Funktionalität und dem Wiederverwendungspotential von Testartefakten und -resultaten effizient testet. Für die Testmodellierung entwickeln wir einen Ansatz, der Variabilitäts- sowie Versionsinformation von evolvierenden SPL gleichermaßen für die Modellierung einbezieht. Für die Änderungsauswirkungsanalyse definieren wir zwei Techniken, um zum einen Änderungen in Ausführungsabhängigkeiten zwischen zu testenden Varianten und ihren Versionen zu identifizieren und zum anderen die Auswirkungen eines Evolutionsschrittes auf die Variantenmenge zu bestimmen und zu klassifizieren. Für die Testfallselektion schlagen wir ein Abdeckungskriterium vor, das die Resultate der Auswirkungsanalyse einbezieht, um automatisierte Entscheidungen über einen Wiederholungstest von wiederverwendbaren Testfällen durchzuführen. Die abdeckungsgetriebene Testfallselektion ermöglicht somit die Reduktion der redundanten Testfallausführungen während des inkrementellen Testens von Varianten und Variantenversionen. Das Framework ist prototypisch implementiert und anhand von drei evolvierenden SPL evaluiert. Die Resultate zeigen, dass eine Aufwandsreduktion für das Testen evolvierender SPL erreicht wird