Compositional Algorithmic Verification of Software Product Lines

Abstract

Abstract. Software product line engineering allows large software systems to be developed and adapted for varying customer needs. The products of a software product line can be described by means of a hierarchical variability model specifying the commonalities and variabilities between the artifacts of the individual products. The number of products generated by a hierarchical model is exponential in its size, which poses a serious challenge to software product line analysis and verification. For an analysis technique to scale, the effort has to be linear in the size of the model rather than linear in the number of products it generates. Hence, efficient product line verification is only possible if compositional verification techniques are applied that allow the analysis of products to be relativized on the properties of their variation points. In this paper, we propose simple hierarchical variability models (SHVM) with explicit variation points as a novel way to describe a set of products consisting of sets of methods. SHVMs provide a trade-off between expressiveness and a clean and simple model suitable for compositional verification. We generalize a previously developed compositional technique and tool set for the automatic verification of control-flow based temporal safety properties to product lines defined by SHVMs, and prove soundness of the generalization. The desired property relativization is achieved by introducing variation point specifications. We evaluate the proposed technique on a number of test cases.

Towards Modular Verification of Software Product Lines with mCRL2

“…In [36], an existing compositional verification technique for safety properties of flow-graph behavior of general-purpose programs is adapted to programs from the SPL domain, that are organized according to a hierarchical variability model defining variation points and interfaces. This compositional approach scales well, but it is not feature-based and limited to control-flow behavior, for which it can express properties in a fragment of the modal µ-calculus.…”

A Classification and Survey of Analysis Strategies for Software Product Lines

“…Family-based model checking has been applied to composition-based Greenyer et al 2013;Apel et al 2013c;Classen et al 2013;Sabouri and Khosravi 2013a;Classen et al 2014] and annotation-based Gruler et al 2008 Besides the product line's source code or an abstraction thereof, family-based model checking requires a formalism to encode properties (i.e., specifications) to be checked. Most approaches are based on computation tree logic (CTL) Greenyer et al 2013;Classen et al 2013;Cordy et al 2013a;Classen et al 2014] or linear temporal logic (LTL) Schaefer et al 2010;Cordy et al 2012b;ter Beek et al 2013;Sabouri and Khosravi 2013b;. Gruler et al [2008] and Sabouri and Khosravi [2012] use the µ-calculus as a generalization of CTL and LTL.…”

“…These specification techniques have been lifted to product lines using different strategies. The surveyed approaches use domain-independent [Post and Sinz 2008;Sabouri and Khosravi 2013a], family-wide Gruler et al 2008;Schaefer et al 2010;Sabouri and Khosravi 2012;Cordy et al 2012c;Greenyer et al 2013;ter Beek et al 2013;Sabouri and Khosravi 2013b;, feature-based Classen et al 2010;Apel et al 2011;Apel et al 2013c], and family-based specifications Cordy et al 2012a;Cordy et al 2012b;Classen et al 2013;Cordy et al 2013a;Cordy et al 2013b;Classen et al 2014].…”

“…First, we found that, in almost all studies, a particular strategy is compared to an unoptimized product-based analysis Schaefer et al 2010;Cordy et al 2012a;Cordy et al 2012c;Sabouri and Khosravi 2012;Greenyer et al 2013;Apel et al 2013c;Classen et al 2013;Sabouri and Khosravi 2013a;Classen et al 2013;Sabouri and Khosravi 2013b;Classen et al 2014;Chen et al 2014] or to the analysis of a single product [Post and Sinz 2008;Delaware et al 2009;Kenner et al 2010;Kästner et al 2011;Kästner et al 2012a;Gazzillo and Grimm 2012]. The advantage of such a standard evaluation is that we can compare different approaches more easily; even if evaluations strongly depend on the size and kind of product line being analyzed.…”

Software product line analysis with mCRL2

“…The approach however does not aim to reuse properties of behavioral feature models across di↵erent products. In [51], an existing compositional verification technique for safety properties of flow-graph behavior of general-purpose programs is adapted to program families, organized according to a hierarchical variability model defining interfaces and variation points. This compositional approach scales well, but it is not feature-based and limited to control-flow behavior, for which it can express properties in a fragment of the modal µ-calculus.…”