Evolving feature model configurations in software product lines

The increasing complexity and cost of software-intensive systems has led developers to seek ways of reusing software components across development projects. One approach to increasing software reusability is to develop a Software Product-line (SPL), which is a software architecture that can be reconfigured and reused across projects. Rather than developing software from scratch for a new project, a new configuration of the SPL is produced. It is hard, however, to find a configuration of an SPL that meets an arbitrary requirement set and does not violate any configuration constraints in the SPL. Existing research has focused on techniques that produce a configuration of an SPL in a single step. Budgetary constraints or other restrictions, however, may require multi-step configuration processes. For example, an aircraft manufacturer may want to produce a series of configurations of a plane over a span of years without exceeding a yearly budget to add features. This paper provides three contributions to the study of multi-step configuration for SPLs. First, we present a formal model of multi-step SPL configuration and map this model to constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). Second, we show how solutions to these SPL configuration problems can be automatically derived with a constraint solver by mapping them to CSPs. Moreover, we show how feature model changes can be mapped to our approach in a multi-step scenario by using feature model drift. Third, we present empirical results demonstrating that our CSP-based reasoning technique can scale to SPL models with hundreds of features and multiple configuration steps. ∗Corresponding author Email addresses: [email protected] (J. White), [email protected] (José A. Galindo), [email protected] (T. Saxena), [email protected] (B. Dougherty), [email protected] (D. Benavides), [email protected] (D.C. Schmidt) Preprint submitted to Journal of Systems and Software September 16, 2013 Evolving Feature Model Configurations in Software Product Lines J. Whited,∗, José A. Galindoe, T. Saxenaf, B. Doughertyd, D. Benavidese, D.C. Schmidtf dVanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenessee, USA eUniversity of Seville, Seville, Spain fVanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenessee, USA