Automated analysis of feature models: current state and practices

Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are about developing a set of different software products that share some common functionality. Feature models are widely used to encode the common and variant parts of an SPL. The number of products encoded in a feature model grows with the number of features. Given n features and no constraints on valid feature combinations, there are 2n possible products. To deal with this complexity, automated mechanisms are used to extract information from feature models, such as features present in every product. A diversity of operations have been developed to model check, test, configure, debug, or compute relevant information by analyzing feature models. Moreover, such operations have been used in scenarios from different domains ranging from operating systems to video analysis optimization. In this tutorial, we go through the different automated analysis operations identifying its usage in the literature. Later present how to implement these operations within the FaMa framework.