Towards a Family-based Analysis of Applicability Conditions in Architectural Delta Models
This work addresses efficiency issues in software product line development, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing delta modeling techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently checking applicability conditions in architectural delta models for software product lines by proposing a family-based analysis using inverse deltas, which avoids redundant computations by reusing previously generated architecture variants.
Modeling variability in software architectures is a fundamental part of software product line development. ?-MontiArc allows describing architectural variability in a modular way by a designated core architecture and a set of architectural delta models modifying the core architecture to realize other architecture variants. Delta models have to satisfy a set of applicability conditions for the definedness of the architectural variants. The applicability conditions can in principle be checked by generating all possible architecture variants, which requires considering the same intermediate architectures repeatedly. In order to reuse previously computed architecture variants, we propose a family-based analysis of the applicability conditions using the concept of inverse deltas.