Model-Based Round-Trip Engineering and Testing of Evolving Software Product Lines

This chapter describes a model-based framework for systematic round-trip engineering of continuously evolving software product line implementations. The product-line architecture consists of a feature diagram as configuration model and a preprocessor-based C code implementation comprising all software variants. As quality-assurance methodology, we consider white-box testing, where test suites are automatically generated for product-line implementations with respect to a given set of test goals to be covered on all derivable software variants. The approach employs techniques from meta-modelling and model differencing to uniformly reason about product-line artefact changes and their potential impact on every possible kind of artefact consistency. The approach further combines model differencing, model merging, and regression testing to systematically co-evolve product-line engineering and quality-assurance artefacts accordingly. The approach is illustrated by application scenarios concerning the xPPU case study.