Code-Level Functional Equivalence Checking of Annotative Software Product Lines

Abstract

Software functional equivalence checking is a technique for analyzing the impact of change of a portion of code on the rest of the system. The existing functional equivalence checking approaches are applicable only at the individual software product level. In this paper, we propose a lifted functional equivalence checking approach, CLEVER-V, that can efficiently handle annotative software product lines. Instead of checking functional equivalence of every product separately, CLEVER-V analyzes all products together to iteratively identify groups of non-equivalent products with common causes. We report on the implementation of the lifted functional equivalence checking approach and demonstrate its effectiveness and scalability on a suite of 288 realistic software updates from BusyBox.