Verification of Software Product Lines Using Contracts

Software product lines are widely used to achieve high reuse of code artifacts for similar software products. While there are many efficient techniques to implement product lines, such as feature-oriented programming, the analysis and verification of product lines got only little attention so far. But as product lines are increasingly used in safety critical scenarios, efficient verification techniques are indispensable. We give an overview on the state-of-the-art in product-line verification, in which we classify approaches according to their strategy to scale specification and verification approaches known from single-system engineering. We propose to use contracts (i.e., preconditions and postconditions) to specify the intended behavior of a product line implemented with featureoriented programming. Based on these contracts, we discuss different approaches to verify that all products of a product line fulfill its specification. Keywords-Software product lines, feature-oriented programming, design by contract, specification, verification