In software product line engineering, reusable artifacts are pro-actively created such that they can efficiently be reused in order to build customer-specific software products. To support the efficient reuse, variability is explicitly defined and introduced into the reusable artifacts. This variability implies that the reusable artifacts do not define a single software product but a set of such products. Specifically, the reusable artifacts do not constitute an executable system which could be tested. Thus, in order to check the reusable artifacts of a software product line for defects, the variability in those artifacts has to be handled.

This invited talk will elaborate on different strategies for how to handle the variability in the reusable artifacts, and how existing quality assurance techniques for software product lines, including feature interaction analysis, address the specific challenges that are posed by those strategies.