Architecture-based unit testing of the flight software product line

This paper presents an analysis of the unit testing approach developed and used by the Core Flight Software (CFS) product line team at the NASA GSFC. The goal of the analysis is to understand, review, and recommend strategies for improving the existing unit testing infrastructure as well as to capture lessons learned and best practices that can be used by other product line teams for their unit testing. The CFS unit testing framework is designed and implemented as a set of variation points, and thus testing support is built into the product line architecture. The analysis found that the CFS unit testing approach has many practical and good solutions that are worth considering when deciding how to design the testing architecture for a product line, which are documented in this paper along with some suggested improvements.