Towards incremental model slicing for delta-oriented software product lines

Abstract

The analysis of nowadays software systems for supporting, e.g., testing, verification or debugging is becoming more challenging due to their increasing complexity. Model slicing is a promising analysis technique to tackle this issue by abstracting from those parts not influencing the current point of interest. In the context of software product lines, applying model slicing separately for each variant is in general infeasible. Delta modeling allows exploiting the explicit specification of commonality and variability within deltas and enables the reuse of artifacts and already obtained results to reduce the modeling and analysis efforts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for incremental model slicing for delta-oriented software product lines. Based on the specification of model changes between variants by means of model regression deltas, an incremental adaptation of variant-specific dependency graphs as well as an incremental slice computation is achieved. The slice computation further allows for the derivation of differences between slices for the same point of interest enhancing, e.g., change impact analysis. We provide details of our incremental approach, discuss benefits and present future work.