Germain Saval

Disambiguating the Documentation of Variability in Software Product Lines: A Separation of Concerns, Formalization and Automated Analysis

Feature diagrams are a popular means for documenting variability in software product line engineering. When examining feature diagrams in the literature and from industry, we observed that the same modelling concepts are used for documenting two different kinds of variability: (1) product line variability, which reflects decisions of product management on how the systems that belong to the product line should vary, and (2) software variability, which reflects the ability of the reusable product line artefacts to be customized or configured. To disambiguate the documentation of variability, we follow previous suggestions to relate orthogonal variability models (OVMs) to feature diagrams. This paper reuses an existing formalization of feature diagrams, but introduces a formalization of OVMs. Then, the relationships between the two kinds of models are formalized as well. Besides a precise definition of the languages and the links, the important benefit of this formalization is that it serves as a foundation for a tool supporting automated reasoning on variability. This tool can, e.g., analyse whether the product line artefacts are flexible enough to build all the systems that should belong to the product line.

Synthèse de diagrammes d'états par classe à partir de diagrammes de séquence

To model the behavior of a distributed system, analysts often use two types of languages: Sequence Diagrams and State Diagrams. The former presents a birds eye view on objects interactions, whereas the latter describes the complete local behavior of every object. Many algorithms translating scenarios to state machines have been devised. All these algorithms work at instance-level, i.e. for a fixed finite number of objects. Real-world objectoriented systems often contain arbitrarily many objects. Modeling languages and synthesis algorithms need to be adapted to this situation. We propose to add universal and existential quantifiers. After defining the syntax and semantics of the two extended languages, we extend also a state of the art algorithm by a novel instantiation step to cope with quantifiers. As the base algorithm, our correction is weak since it allows implied behaviors.