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Features meet scenarios: modeling and consistency-checking scenario-based product line specifications

  • RE 2012
  • Published:
Requirements Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Many modern software-intensive systems consist of multiple components interacting together to deliver the intended functionality. Often, these systems come in many variants (products) and are managed together as a software product line. This variability is the source of additional complexity which can cause inconsistencies and offset the economies of scale promised by product line engineering. Engineers thus need intuitive, yet precise means for specifying requirements and require tools for automatically detecting inconsistencies within these requirements. In recent work, we proposed a technique for the scenario-based specification of interactions in product lines by a combination of Modal Sequence Diagrams and Feature Diagrams. Furthermore, we elaborated an efficient consistency-checking technique based on a dedicated model-checking approach especially tailored for product lines. In this paper, we report on further evaluations that underline significant performance benefits of our approach. We describe further optimizations and detail on how we encode the consistency-checking problem for a model-checker.

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Notes

  1. Neue Bahntechnik Paderborn/RailCab, http://www-nbp.upb.de.

  2. Optional features are not used in the example appearing in this paper.

  3. Note that we use the terms consistency and realizability synonymously, but that they are used differently in literature. In Abadi et al. [2], a specification is consistent iff there exists a system and some (friendly) environment that composed can satisfy the specification. Instead, a specification is realizable iff there exists a system that composed with any environment can satisfy the specification. The definition of consistency in Harel et al. [16] instead also takes into account that the system must react to all possible sequences of environment events, which corresponds to realizability in Abadi et al. [2]. Realizability in Harel et al. [16] especially refers to the fact that there exists a distributed implementation for the system objects (one finite-state controller per system object) that implements the specification. (They show that their form of realizability and consistency are equivalent.) In Bontemps et al. [4] (see especially the discussion in [4, Sect. 5.2.1]), the consistency condition by Abadi et al. [2] is called satisfiability. We stick to the terminology used in the LSC/MSD-related literature, based on Harel et al. and Bontemps et al.

  4. The formula does not explicitly state that there must exist a sequence of system messages. However, the model restricts that only system messages can occur if active_system is true (see Listing 8).

  5. http://www.cs.upb.de/index.php?id=scenariotools.

  6. http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/nusmv-tools/.

  7. http://www.cs.uni-paderborn.de/fachgebiete/fachgebiet-softwaretechnik/forschung/projekte/tgg-interpreter.html.

  8. http://info.fundp.ac.be/fts/implementations/msd2smv.

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Acknowledgments

This research is funded by the European Commission, Programme IDEAS-ERC, Project 227977 SMScom, and by the Fund for Scientific Research—FNRS in Belgium, Project FC 91490. We thank the Collaborative Research Center 614 at the University of Paderborn for providing the infrastructure for our experiments, and especially Jürgen Maniera for the technical support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dependable Evolvable Pervasive Software Engineering, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Joel Greenyer & Amir Molzam Sharifloo

  2. PReCISE Research Center, University of Namur, Namur, Belgium

    Maxime Cordy & Patrick Heymans

Authors
  1. Joel Greenyer
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  2. Amir Molzam Sharifloo
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  3. Maxime Cordy
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  4. Patrick Heymans
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maxime Cordy.

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Maxime Cordy:FNRS research fellow.

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Greenyer, J., Molzam Sharifloo, A., Cordy, M. et al. Features meet scenarios: modeling and consistency-checking scenario-based product line specifications. Requirements Eng 18, 175–198 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-013-0169-4

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