Enabling Verifiable Conformance for Product Lines

NASA is, with the rest of industry, turning to product-line engineering to reduce costs and improve quality by effectively managing reuse. Experience in industry has shown that it is the verifiable conformance of each system to the product-line specifications that makes or breaks the product-line practice. Verification that the software for each project satisfies its intended product-line constraints is thus essential. This paper reports early results from an effort to assemble from previous, industrial experience a set of enablers of verifiable conformance for use in the application engineering of NASA product lines. Lessons learned may be useful for developers of safetycritical, long-lived, or highly autonomous product lines, as well as for companies that integrate product line subsystems developed by multiple contractors.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SPLC
• Authors: Robyn R. Lutz
• Keywords: Intended Product-line Constraints, Product Line, Software Engineering, SPLC 2008, Verifiable Conformance