Test scenario generation for feature-based context-oriented software systems

Feature-based context-oriented programming reconciles ideas from context-oriented programming, feature modelling and dynamic software product lines. It offers a programming language, architecture, tools and methodology to develop software systems consisting of contexts and features that can become active at run-time to offer the most appropriate behaviour depending on the actual context of use. Due to their high run-time adaptivity, dedicated tool support to test such systems is needed. Building upon a pairwise combinatorial interaction testing approach from the domain of software product lines, we implement an algorithm to generate automatically a small set of relevant test scenarios, ordered to minimise the number of context activations between tests. We also explore how the generated scenarios can be enhanced incrementally when the software evolves, and how useful the proposed testing approach is in practice. •Generation of a test suite for context-oriented systems with logarithmic growth.•Prioritisation of the tests with context-oriented criteria (creation cost).•Social experiment shows the usefulness of our approach for design testing.•Test suite augmentation algorithm for new system version (cost reduced by 34).