Test Scenario Generation for Context-Oriented Programs

TL;DR

This paper presents a methodology for automating test scenario generation in context-oriented programs, leveraging combinatorial interaction testing and incremental adaptation to improve testing efficiency and reduce reconfiguration costs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining combinatorial testing with context-feature separation and incremental updates for testing context-oriented software.

Findings

Generated test scenarios are representative and reduce testing effort.

Rearranged scenarios minimize reconfiguration costs.

Incremental test suite adaptation is effective for evolving systems.

Abstract

Their highly adaptive nature and the combinatorial explosion of possible configurations makes testing context-oriented programs hard. We propose a methodology to automate the generation of test scenarios for developers of feature-based context-oriented programs. By using combinatorial interaction testing we generate a covering array from which a small but representative set of test scenarios can be inferred. By taking advantage of the explicit separation of contexts and features in such context-oriented programs, we can further rearrange the generated test scenarios to minimise the reconfiguration cost between subsequent scenarios. Finally, we explore how a previously generated test suite can be adapted incrementally when the system evolves to a new version. By validating these algorithms on a small use case, our initial results show that the proposed test generation approach is efficient and beneficial to developers to test and improve the design of context-oriented programs.