A comparison of product-based, feature-based, and family-based type checking

Abstract

Analyzing software product lines is difficult, due to their inherent variability. In the past, several strategies for product-line analysis have been proposed, in particular, product-based, feature-based, and family-based strategies. Despite recent attempts to conceptually and empirically compare different strategies, there is no work that empirically compares all of the three strategies in a controlled setting. We close this gap by extending a compiler for featureoriented programming with support for product-based, featurebased, and family-based type checking. We present and discuss the results of a comparative performance evaluation that we conducted on a set of 12 feature-oriented, JAVA-based product lines. Most notably, we found that the family-based strategy is superior for all subject product lines: it is substantially faster, it detects all kinds of errors, and provides the most detailed information about them.

On the relation between internal and external feature interactions in feature-oriented product lines

“…The set has been collected and prepared before for benchmarking purposes, and most of the systems have been already used in other studies [2,4,16]. The subject systems belong to different application domains, and have different sizes: in terms of lines of code and number of features.…”

“…We detected the type errors in the subject systems using FUJI [16]. FUJI is an extensible compiler for feature-oriented programming in JAVA that also provides a variability-aware type checker and a set of product-line analysis tools.…”