Structural Validation of Software Product Line Variants: A Graph Transformations Based Approach

Abstract

A Software Product Line is a set of software products that share a number of core properties but also differ in others. Differences and commonalities between products are typically described in terms of features. A software product line is usually modeled with a feature diagram, describing the set of features and specifying the constraints and relationships between these features. Each product is defined as a set of features. In this area of research, a key challenge is to ensure correctness and safety of these products. There is an increasing need for automatic tools that can support feature diagram analysis, particularly with a large number of features that modern software systems may have. In this paper, we propose using model transformations an automatic approach to validate products according to dependencies defined in the feature diagram. We first introduce the necessary meta-models. Then, we present the used graph grammars to perform automatically this task using the AToM3 tool. Finally, we show the feasibility of our proposal by means of running examples.