An extensible platform for product-line behavioural analysis

Abstract

Software Product-Line (SPL) model checking has reached an adequate level of efficiency and expressiveness to be applied on real-world cases. Yet a major challenge remains: model checkers should consist of black-box tools that do not require in-depth expertise to be used. In particular, it is essential to provide engineers with easy-to-learn languages to model both the behaviour of their SPL and the properties to check. In this paper, we propose a framework to build customized product-line verifiers modularly. Our extensible architecture allows one to plug new modelling languages or verifications algorithms without modifying other parts of it. It also provides means of representing and reasoning on variability that can facilitate the development of other SPL quality assurance techniques. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by detailing how we created a new domain-specific SPL modelling language and linked it to our tool.