Compositional Verification of Evolving Software Product Lines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compositional verification method for Software Product Lines that models requirements and designs as finite state machines with variability, supporting incremental feature addition and ensuring product conformance.

Contribution

It presents a novel, compositional verification approach for SPLs with variability, implemented in a prototype tool and applicable to large case studies.

Findings

Verification reduces to feature-level checks

Supports incremental addition of features

Successfully applied to large case studies

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to the design verification of Software Product Lines(SPL). The proposed approach assumes that the requirements and designs are modeled as finite state machines with variability information. The variability information at the requirement and design levels are expressed differently and at different levels of abstraction. Also the proposed approach supports verification of SPL in which new features and variability may be added incrementally. Given the design and requirements of an SPL, the proposed design verification method ensures that every product at the design level behaviorally conforms to a product at the requirement level. The conformance procedure is compositional in the sense that the verification of an entire SPL consisting of multiple features is reduced to the verification of the individual features. The method has been implemented and demonstrated in a prototype tool SPLEnD (SPL Engine for Design Verification) on a couple of fairly large case studies.