Guaranteeing Syntactic Correctness for All Product Line Variants: A Language-Independent Approach

A software product line (SPL) is a family of related program variants in a well-defined domain, generated from a set of features. A fundamental difference from classical application development is that engineers develop not a single program but a whole family with hundreds to millions of variants. This makes it infeasible to separately check every distinct variant for errors. Still engineers want guarantees on the entire SPL. A further challenge is that an SPL may contain artifacts in different languages (code, documentation, models, etc.) that should be checked. In this paper, we present CIDE, an SPL development tool that guarantees syntactic correctness for all variants of an SPL. We show how CIDE’s underlying m abstracts from textual representation and we generalize it to arbitrary languages. Furthermore, we automate the generation of plug-ins for additional languages from annotated grammars. To demonstrate the language-independent capabilities, we applied CIDE to a series of cas...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: TOOLS
• Authors: Christian Kästner, Sven Apel, Salvador Trujillo, Martin Kuhlemann, Don S. Batory
• Keywords: Entire Spl, Programming Languages, Related Program Variants, SPL Development Tool, TOOLS 2009