On Featured Transition Systems

Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are families of similar software products built from a common set of features. As the number of products of an SPL is potentially exponential in the number of its features, analysing SPLs is harder than for single software. In this invited paper, we synthesise six years of efforts in alleviating SPL verification and testing issues. To this end, we introduced Featured Transition Systems (FTS) as a compact behavioural model for SPLs. Based on this formalism, we designed verification algorithms and tools allowing to check temporal properties on FTS, thereby assessing the correct behaviour of all the SPL products. We also used FTS to define test coverage and generation techniques for model-driven SPLs. We also successfully employed the formalism in order to foster mutation analysis. We conclude with future directions on the development of FTS for SPL analysis.