2011/09/30 by Sven Apel, Hendrik Speidel, Apel, Sven +7
Computer Science · #Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Formal Methods in Verification #Programming Languages (cs.PL) #Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #cs.PL #cs.SE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1110.0021
12 pages, 9 figures, 1 table
arxiv created 2011/09/30 · openalex publication_date 2011/09/30 · arxiv updated 2015/03/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.