A cost effective approach for analyzing software product lines

Abstract

In the area of Software Product Lines(SPL), most of the research work focuses on automated analysis of SPLs and the traceability relation between the problem domain and solution domain. An SPL with few features can generate billions of products; to analyze such a large product space, we need efficient analysis operations. For a given specification, we can get many possible implementations; choosing one implementation from this is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we extend the work on analyzing software product lines to propose a cost effective approach that fetches products from a given SPL based on various factors. When there are multiple implementations for a given specification, then it is the cost factors which determine the product selection. To this end, we propose a revised formal framework for SPLs with cost factors. This approach has been implemented in a tool SPLANE-CF (SPL Analysis Engine with Cost Factors). We illustrate the efficiency of SPLANE-CF on a fairly large size case study. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.