MIP-1105

Paper Description

BibTeX entry

@incollection{MIP-1105,
author={S. Apel, H. Speidel, P. Wendler, A. von Rhein, D. Beyer},
title={{Feature-Aware Verification}},
institution={{Fakult{\"a}t  f{\"u}r Informatik und Mathematik, Universit{\"a}t Passau}},
year={2011},
number={MIP-1105}
}

Abstract

A software product line is a set of software products that are distinguished in terms of features (i.e., end-user–visible units of behavior). Feature interactions —situations in which the combination of features leads to emergent and possibly critical behavior— are a major source of failures in software product lines. We explore how feature-aware verification can improve the automatic detection of feature interactions in software product lines. Feature-aware verification uses product-line verification techniques and supports the specification of feature properties along with the features in separate and composable units. It integrates the technique of variability encoding to verify a product line without generating and checking a possibly exponential number of feature combinations. We developed the tool suite
SPLVERIFIER for feature-aware verification, which is based on standard model-checking technology. We applied it to an e-mail system that incorporates domain knowledge of AT&T. We found that feature interactions can be detected automatically based on specifications that have only feature-local knowledge, and that variability encoding significantly improves the verification performance when proving the absence of interactions.

Paper itself

 MIP-1105.pdf