Long-term average cost in featured transition systems

Abstract

A software product line is a family of software products that share a common set of mandatory features and whose individual products are differentiated by their variable (optional or alternative) features. Family-based analysis of software product lines takes as input a single model of a complete product line and analyzes all its products at the same time. As the number of products in a software product line may be large, this is generally preferable to analyzing each product on its own. Family-based analysis, however, requires that standard algorithms be adapted to accomodate variability. In this paper we adapt the standard algorithm for computing limit average cost of a weighted transition system to software product lines. Limit average is a useful and popular measure for the long-term average behavior of a quality attribute such as performance or energy consumption, but has hitherto not been available for family-based analysis of software product lines. Our algorithm operates on weighted featured transition systems, at a symbolic level, and computes limit average cost for all products in a software product line at the same time. We have implemented the algorithm and evaluated it on several examples.