Tailoring Infrastructure Software Product Lines by Static Application Analysis

Abstract

Besides ordinary applications, also infrastructure software such as operating systems or database management systems is being developed as a software product line. With proper tool support these systems can be configured easily by selecting features in a feature model. However, in the future multi-level architectures of layered product lines will be common practice. For humans the feature-based configuration will become increasingly complex, as the number of configurable features will be tremendous. Our goal is to reduce this complexity. The approach is based on the observation that many configuration decisions could be automated by statically analyzing the code of layers on top of an infrastructure product line. Motivated by use cases the paper presents the concepts behind our analysis tool, which is able to automate the configuration in many cases. First results in the context of a feature-oriented version of the Berkeley DB illustrate the potential of this novel approach.