Simulation-based abstractions for software product-line model checking

Abstract

Software Product Line (SPL) engineering is a software engineering paradigm that exploits the commonality between similar software products to reduce life cycle costs and time-to-market. Many SPLs are critical and would benefit from efficient verification through model checking. Model checking SPLs is more difficult than for single systems, since the number of different products is potentially huge. In previous work, we introduced Featured Transition Systems (FTS), a formal, compact representation of SPL behaviour, and provided efficient algorithms to verify FTS. Yet, we still face the state explosion problem, like any model checking-based verification. Model abstraction is the most relevant answer to state explosion. In this paper, we define a novel simulation relation for FTS and provide an algorithm to compute it. We extend well-known simulation preservation properties to FTS and thus lay the theoretical foundations for abstraction-based model checking of SPLs. We evaluate our approach by comparing the cost of FTS-based simulation and abstraction with respect to productby-product methods. Our results show that FTS are a solid foundation for simulation-based model checking of SPL.

On Featured Transition Systems

“…As is the addition of inputs and outputs for ioco conformance [3]. With respect to mutation, we would like to formally investigate the mutant equivalence problem using exact or approximate simulation techniques [13].…”

A Classification and Survey of Analysis Strategies for Software Product Lines

“…The majority of approaches for family-based model checking apply abstract model checking. Abstract models have been defined using I/O automata , labeled transition systems Sabouri and Khosravi 2012;ter Beek et al 2013;Sabouri and Khosravi 2014], modal transition systems Asirelli et al 2012], featured transition systems Cordy et al 2012a;Cordy et al 2012b;Classen et al 2013;Sabouri and Khosravi 2013a;Cordy et al 2013b;Cordy et al 2013a;Classen et al 2014], featured timed automata , modal sequence diagrams , and actor models [Sabouri and Khosravi 2013b]. In contrast, several authors proposed approaches for family-based software model checking.…”

Facilitating Reuse in Multi-goal Test-Suite Generation for Software Product Lines

“…Family-based SPL analysis approaches focus on lifting static analysis and model-checking techniques to entire product lines. Some of those approaches also use symbolic model-checking techniques, handling features as special inputs, as in our approach [14,16]. However, those approaches consider a family-based evaluation of one particular model-checking query without systematic reuse of analysis results.…”

“…Various promising attempts have been proposed, enhancing respective model-checking and software-testing techniques to efficiently verify entire families of software products instead of every single variant [4,12,14,16]. In practice, systematic software testing remains the most established and elaborated quality-assurance technique, as it is directly applicable to real-world applications at any level of abstraction [28].…”