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BigLever keeps testing, feature variations in sync


By David Rubinstein
September 25, 2009 —  Variations that occur in software product line development create problems for the quality assurance team. To address that difficulty, BigLever Software has announced the creation of a program designed to bring testing onto equal footing with others aspects of the product line life cycle, such as requirements and coding.

Software product line development helps organizations that have a portfolio of similar products that use much of the same code base, but have differences in features and functions. To ensure good testing is occurring, it’s important to have symmetry between requirements and integration tests, design models and subsystem tests, and source code and unit tests for each variation of the software. BigLever is introducing a methodology for providing this symmetry throughout the product line life cycle as part of the new program.

So when components are developed with product differences in mind, it’s important to create tests in parallel, explained Charles Krueger, CEO of BigLever. As unit tests are created, the same mechanisms for introducing variations into the code base need to be put into the tests, he added.

“When you’re creating diversity in the life cycle, you want the test suite to be automatically configured to test the features you have,” Krueger said. As an example, he said: “If you’re doing a car, you don’t want to test the GPS system if it’s not in that model of car.”

The program is built upon a newly created bridge between BigLever’s Gears SPL Lifecycle Framework and IBM’s Rational Quality Manager. This software allows users to define test cases according to features, and indicate in a console view which tests need to be run for which versions of the software. Icons indicate if the tests should be run for all versions, or whether they should be included in certain versions but not others. “It creates a variation point mechanism at the test case level,” Krueger said.

Integration techniques and strategies for using open-source frameworks, such as CppUnit and JUnit, are provided for managing the unit test variations in a manner that corresponds to executable models and source code. The Gears framework/Quality Manager bridge enables users to automatically configure unit tests to match the feature sets of each product in the product line.

“The product line problem is pervasive. It’s everywhere we look,” Krueger said. “People are realizing that this thing they’re dealing with has a name.”


Related Search Term(s): BigLever


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