A formal approach to software product families

Software product line engineering deals with the combined development of a family of similar software systems. These systems provide a similar set of features and should therefore share a large number of common components. We study the user perspective of features and the engineering perspective of components and present a formal notion of features, component-based product families and their interaction. We then demonstrate using Milner’s CCS how our formalism can be applied to extend an arbitrary modelling formalism with support for product lines. To verify that certain products indeed realize certain features, we propose μ-calculus model-checking for multi-valued Kripke-structures. The model checking result in that case no longer is a simple truth-value, but a set of products, conforming to a certain property.