Towards automated consistency checks of product line requirements specifications

  • Authors:

  • Kim Lauenroth;Klaus Pohl

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany;University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

A requirements specification for an individual software system should be consistent, i.e. free of contradictions. In product line engineering, the product line requirements specification comprises all the requirements common to all products of the product line as well as the variable requirements used to derive individual products from the product line. The set of requirements (common and all the variable ones) of a product line is typically inconsistent since variable requirements can contradict each other. This is not a problem as long as contradicting requirements are not included in a product derived from the product line. Thus, the set of requirements realized in each individual product has to be consistent. Employing techniques used in single system development to check the consistency of product line requirements will thus produce false positive results, since there can be contradiction in the product line requirements specification In this paper we first provide a concise definition of consistency for product line requirements specifications. Based on this definition, we define a formal framework for checking consistency of product line requirements specifications. Our framework supports consistency checks in the domain engineering process. In contrast to consistency checks in single system development, it tolerates certain types of inconsistencies caused by the variability of prod-uct line requirements.