Automatic analysis of software architectures with variability

Abstract

Software Product Line Engineering is successfully applied in the development of families of related products. Basically, it allows reusing the software artifacts that are common to all the products, and adding/removing the variable ones. There are two alternatives to manage variability, one that models the commonalities and variabilities separately from the software product line architecture (SPLA), using, for instance, feature models (FM), and another one that models the variability as part of the SPLA. These two alternatives have both benefits and limitations. Our approach picks the best of both alternatives and, on the one hand, models variability as part of the SPLA (as in the second alternative), but, on the other hand, maps the SPLA with variability into an FM, generating an Architectural FM. By doing this our approach takes advantage of the FM tools and formal reasoning (as in the first alternative) to provide the automatic support that it is not available in other SPLA with variability approaches to: (i) check the consistency of architectural variability specifications, (ii) generate valid architectural configurations, and (iii) reason about variability at the architectural level. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.