Section: New Results

Generating Counterexamples of Model-based Software Product Lines: An Exploratory Study

Model-based Software Product Line (MSPL) engineering aims at deriving customized models corresponding to individual products of a family. The design space of an MSPL is extremely complex to manage for the engineer, since the number of variants may be exponential and the derived product models have to conform to numerous well-formedness and business rules. We provide a way to generate MSPLs, called counterexamples, that can produce invalid product models despite a valid configuration in the variability model [49] . We provide a systematic and automated process, based on the Common Variability Language (CVL), to randomly search the space of MSPLs for a specific formalism. We validate the effectiveness of this process for three formalisms at different scales (up to 247 metaclasses and 684 rules).