Software Product Line Maintenance Using Multi-Objective Optimization Techniques

Currently, software development is more associated with families of configurable software than the single implementation of a product. Due to the numerous possible combinations in a software product line, testing these families of software product lines (SPLs) is a difficult undertaking. Moreover, the presence of optional features makes the testing of SPLs impractical. Several features are presented in SPLs, but due to the environment’s time and financial constraints, these features are rendered unfeasible. Thus, testing subsets of configured products is one approach to solving this issue. To reduce the testing effort and obtain better results, alternative methods for testing SPLs are required, such as the combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) technique. Unfortunately, the CIT method produces unscalable solutions for large SPLs with excessive constraints. The CIT method costs more because of feature combinations. The optimization of the various conflicting testing objectives, such as reducing the cost and configuration number, should also be considered. In this article, we proposed a search-based software engineering solution using multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). In particular, the research was applied to different types of MOEA method: the Indicator-Based Evolutionary Algorithm (IBEA), Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm based on Decomposition (MOEA/D), Non-dominant Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGAII), NSGAIII, and Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA2). The results of the algorithms were examined in the context of distinct objectives and two quality indicators. The results revealed how the feature model attributes, implementation context, and number of objectives affected the performances of the algorithms.