Flexible and Scalable Consistency Checking on Product Line Variability Models

Authors: Michael Vierhauser, Paul Grünbacher, Alexander Egyed, Rick Rabiser, Wolfgang Heider

The complexity of product line variability models makes it hard to maintain their consistency over time regardless of the modeling approach used. Engineers thus need support for detecting and resolving inconsistencies. We describe a tool-supported approach for incremental consistency checking on variability models. Our approach significantly improves the overall performance and scalability compared to batch-oriented techniques and allows providing immediate feedback to modelers. It is flexible and extensible as new consistency constraints can easily be added. Furthermore,the approach is not limited to variability models and also checks the consistency of the models with the underlying code base of the product line. We present tool support and report the results of a thorough evaluation based on realworld
product line models.

 

 

 

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