Applying Declarative Analysis to Software Product Line Models: An Industrial Study

Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are families of related software products developed from a common set of artifacts. Most existing analysis tools can be applied to a single product at a time, but not to an entire SPL. Some tools have been redesigned/re-implemented to support the kind of variability exhibited in SPLs, but this usually takes a lot of effort, and is error-prone. Declarative analyses written in languages like Datalog have been collectively lifted to SPLs in prior work [1], which makes the process of applying an existing declarative analysis to a product line more straightforward.In this paper, we take an existing declarative analysis (behaviour alteration) and apply it to a set of automotive software product lines from General Motors. We discuss the design of the analysis pipeline used in this process, present its scalability results, and provide a means to visualize the analysis results for a subset of products filtered by feature expression. We also reflect on some of the lessons learned throughout this project.

Applying declarative analysis to industrial automotive software product line models

“…Early results of this work were published in the Practice and Innovation Track of MODELS 2021 (Shahin et al, 2021b). This paper extends this earlier work in the following ways: (1) We outline five different declarative analyses written in Datalog and present the results of applying them to a set of industrial software product lines from General Motors.…”

“…Our evaluation compares the performance of analyzing the whole product line against analyzing the configuration that includes all features. Only one of these analyses (behavior alteration) was covered in (Shahin et al, 2021b). ( 2) We provide a detailed description of the interactive visualization and filtering of results.…”

“…( 2) We provide a detailed description of the interactive visualization and filtering of results. (3) We present the results of applying the extended set of analyses to seven product lines from General Motors, as opposed to the six product line models described in (Shahin et al, 2021b).…”

Managed Evolution of Automotive Software Product Line Architectures: A Systematic Literature Study

“…This section discusses studies P310 [62], P343 [64], E183 [87], and E187 [88], which were assigned to the testing and verification category. Due to the high degree of variability that results in a potentially huge number of products, testing and verification of a software product line are challenging tasks.…”

Colla-Config: A stakeholders preferences-based approach for product lines collaborative configuration

“…Selected features must comply with product line model constraints and stakeholders requirements (Salinesi et al, 2010). At the industrial scale, product line models may include hundreds of features (Shahin et al, 2021). However, in some cases, they could be larger than expected and may contain thousands of features such as the automotive product line model cited in the work of Pett et al (2019), and the linux kernel which is one of the largest software product lines currently available, reaching 21, 000 features (Nieke et al, 2022).…”