Reducing configurations to monitor in a software product line

  • Authors:

  • Chang Hwan Peter Kim;Eric Bodden;Don Batory;Sarfraz Khurshid

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin;Software Technology Group, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany;Department of Computer Science and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin;Department of Computer Science and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin

  • Venue:
  • RV'10 Proceedings of the First international conference on Runtime verification
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

A software product line is a family of programs where each program is defined by a unique combination of features. Product lines, like conventional programs, can be checked for safety properties through execution monitoring. However, because a product line induces a number of programs that is potentially exponential in the number of features, it would be very expensive to use existing monitoring techniques: one would have to apply those techniques to every single program. Doing so would also be wasteful because many programs can provably never violate the stated property. We introduce a monitoring technique dedicated to product lines that, given a safety property, statically determines the feature combinations that cannot possibly violate the property, thus reducing the number of programs to monitor. Experiments show that our technique is effective, particularly for safety properties that crosscut many optional features.