Detection of feature interactions using feature-aware verification

  • Authors:

  • Sven Apel;Hendrik Speidel;Philipp Wendler;Alexander von Rhein;Dirk Beyer

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Passau, Germany;University of Passau, Germany;University of Passau, Germany;University of Passau, Germany;University of Passau, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ASE '11 Proceedings of the 2011 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

A software product line is a set of software products that are distinguished in terms of features (i.e., end-user-visible units of behavior). Feature interactions-- situations in which the combination of features leads to emergent and possibly critical behavior --are a major source of failures in software product lines. We explore how feature-aware verification can improve the automatic detection of feature interactions in software product lines. Feature-aware verification uses product-line-verification techniques and supports the specification of feature properties along with the features in separate and composable units. It integrates the technique of variability encoding to verify a product line without generating and checking a possibly exponential number of feature combinations. We developed the tool suite SPLVERIFIER for feature-aware verification, which is based on standard model-checking technology. We applied it to an e-mail system that incorporates domain knowledge of AT&T. We found that feature interactions can be detected automatically based on specifications that have only local knowledge.