This paper presents an improvement to existing class test ordering stategies by including coupling measures to reduce non-determinism and decrease the number of stubs to be produced. Our novel strategy aims to lift the known methods from class hierarchies to component-based product lines in which so-called connectors between components are key entities for structuring, assembling and integrating software architectures, and in which tighter coupling of classes inside components and looser coupling between classes in different components are fundamental to component-based architecture composition.

The paper also evaluates the new method and confirms the expected reductions in the number of stubs generated and the improved test ordering. Two recent test order strategies for C++ are compared with our novel approach through experiments conducted on two mini product lines written in Java.

The new proposed test ordering strategy is more deterministic through measuring coupling, which is at the heart of component-based product line architectures.