Structural Validation of Software Product Line Variants: A Graph Transformations Based Approach

A Software Product Line is a set of software products that share a number of core properties but also differin others.Differences and commonalities between products are typically described in terms of features.Asoftware product line is usually modeled with a featurediagram, describing the set of features andspecifying the constraints and relationships between these features. Each product is defined as a set offeatures. In this area ofresearch, a key challenge is to ensure correctness and safety of these products.There is an increasing need for automatic tools that can support feature diagram analysis, particularlywith a large number of features that modern software systems may have. In this paper, we propose usingmodel transformations an automatic approach to validate products according to dependencies defined inthe feature diagram. We first introduce the necessary meta-models. Then, we present the used graphgrammars to perform automatically this task using the AToM3 tool. Finally, we show the feasibility of ourproposal by means of running examples