Towards Automated Test Refactoring for Software Product Lines

In practice, organizations often rely on the clone-and-own approach to reuse and customize existing systems. While increasing maintenance costs encourage some organizations to adopt their development processes towards more systematic reuse, others still avoid migrating to a reusable platform. Based on our experiences, a barrier preventing the adoption of software product lines is the fear of introducing new and more problematic bugs—during the migration or later on. We are aware of several works that automate software-product-line adoption, but they neglect the migration and maintenance of test cases. Automating the refactoring of tests can help to facilitate the adoption barrier, compare the quality after migrations, and support maintenance. In this vision paper, we i) discuss open research challenges that are based on our experiences and ii) sketch a first framework to develop automated solutions. Overall, we aim to illustrate our idea and initiate further research to facilitate the adoption and maintenance of software product lines.