Verification of Software Product Lines with Delta-Oriented Slicing

Software product line (SPL) engineering is a well-known approach to develop industry-size adaptable software systems. SPL are often used in domains where high-quality software is desirable; the overwhelming product diversity, however, remains a challenge for assuring correctness. In this paper, we present delta-oriented slicing, an approach to reduce the deductive verification effort across an SPL where individual products are Java programs and their relations are described by deltas. On the specification side, we extend the delta language to deal with formal specifications. On the verification side, we combine proof slicing and similarity-guided proof reuse to ease the verification process.