Software Product Line Engineering Basics - Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - page 50

The product derivation follows a complete software lifecycle
with re-use of the core assets developed during domain
engineering. Engineers aim at automating and increasing
software productivity. MDE was already used to improve SPLE
and one of its benefits is to make the automation of the
productionplanpossible.However,thisisacomplextask,which
needs several stages and various kinds of artifacts. Variability
can occur everywhere. Given that one objective of SPLE is to
automatetheprocessofderivingproducts,thereexiststheneed
for using mechanisms that allow designers to automatically
select and assemble the common core assets and variable
core assets, which are assets related to variants (features).
Thesemechanismsmustalsoensurethe correct assembling.By
correct , we mean assembling the required configured product.
Therefore, an open issue is the definition of explicit models to
capture (1) the relationships between features and core assets,
and (2) the required rules to assemble them to create valid
products based on product configurations.
2.9.3. Testing
In the context of SPLE,we must revisit the testing practices
since they raise new challenges. In [PM 06a],Pohl and Metzger
summarize the three main points. The first is about what
to test during the two engineering steps. We could test the
commonalities and the different variants. However,separately,
they cannot define a viable product. Another problem is that
the number of product combinations is exploding; thus, it is
not feasible to test all of them. We need to test the realized
products and we expect to re-use the tests done for other
productssharingthesameconcernsorfeatures.Oneruleseems
to define the tests accordingly with the variability; in some
sense,thetestsarenewproductsdefinedduringdomaintesting
and built in application testing. The last point is related to the
variability binding in a product. Two problems occur. In the
first, a feature is not bound in the product, but it should be