Over the last decade, the software product line domain has emerged as
one of the mostpromising software development paradigms. The main benefits
of a software product lineapproach are improvements in productivity, time
to market, product quality, and customersatisfaction.Therefore, one topic
that needs greater emphasis is testing of software product lines toachieve
the required software quality assurance. Our concern is how to test a
softwareproduct line as early as possible in order to detect errors,
because the cost of error detectedIn early phases is much less compared to
the cost of errors when detected later.The method suggested in this thesis
is a model-based, reuse-oriented test technique calledColored Model Based
Testing for Software Product Lines (CMBT-SWPL). CMBT-SWPLis a
requirements-based approach for efficiently generating tests for products
in a soft-ware product line. This testing approach is used for validation
and verification of productlines. It is a novel approach to test product
lines using a Colored State Chart (CSC), whichconsiders variability early
in the product line development process. More precisely, the vari-ability
will be introduced in the main components of the CSC. Accordingly, the
variabilityis preserved in test cases, as they are generated from colored
test models automatically.During domain engineering, the CSC is derived
from the feature model. By coloring theState Chart, the behavior of
several product line variants can be modeled simultaneouslyin a single
diagram and thus address product line variability early. The CSC
representsthe test model, from which test cases using statistical testing
are derived.During application engineering, these colored test models are
customized for a specificapplication of the product line. At the end of
this test process, the test cases are generatedagain using statistical
testing, executed and the test results are ready for evaluation.
Inxaddition, the CSC will be transformed to a Colored Petri Net (CPN) for
verification andsimulation purposes.The main gains of applying the
CMBT-SWPL method are early detection of defects inrequirements, such as
ambiguities incompleteness and redundancy which is then reflectedin saving
the test effort, time, development and maintenance costs