Test suite reduction techniques for software product line testing: a survey

Software product line (SPL) testing is more difficult than testing individual software systems. So far, testing each individual SPL item is fine, but too expensive in practice. Honestly, the number of potential products increases dramatically when the number of features increases, which is usually obtained from feature models. Due to the high volume of production, it is not possible to test all of SPL's products. In order to reduce the testing cost and tester's workload, various methods have been proposed. One of them is the test suite reduction (TSR) strategy for reducing the number of test cases. TSR reduces the time required for regression testing by identifying and removing unnecessary test cases according to a predetermined set of constraints. Therefore, we follow the TSR approach to reduce the number of products in SPL. Here, we conduct a survey of TSR methods for SPL testing. TSR not only reduces test cases but is also used to perform efficient SPL testing. This study aimed to survey the latest research on SPL testing to identify useful methods and needs for future research.