Conformance Checker of Feature Models. Copyright (C) Daniel Diaz and Raúl Mazo. Available to download at the bottom of this site.
The conformance of feature model (FM) is essential for deriving correct products and enables safe automated reasoning operations such as variability analysis, transformation and code generation. In this way, quality assurance of FMs is essential for successful product line engineering and, due to the ability of FMs to derive a potentially large number of products; any error on the FM will inevitably affect many products of the product line. Besides, the proven benefits of a product line (e.g. reduced time to market, better reuse and therefore reduced development costs and increase in software quality) can be compromised by the poor quality of FMs. Therefore, engineers need to be supported in detecting conformance errors during feature modelling.
This tool implements 9 conformance checking rules on the GNU Prolog constraints solver. We evaluated our approach by applying our rules to 50 feature models of sizes up to 10000 features. The evaluation showed that our approach is effective and scalable to industry size models
The efficiency of our approach depends on how conformance rules are written, because in each rule we explicit the elements of the model that will be evaluated. Since conformance rules are typically written manually (by engineer), it is future work to investigate how to automatically optimize conformance rules and if possible how to automatically generate conformance rules directly from the product line model‟s meta-model.
Our approach has been applied to feature models. However, we argue that it is also applicable to other variability formalisms (e.g. OVM, goals, UML, etc).
This conformance checker of FMs, and how to use it, is described in the following paper, that can be download from the Publications page:
Mazo Raúl, Lopez-Herrejon Roberto, Salinesi Camille, Diaz Daniel, Egyed Alexander. Conformance Checking with Constraint Logic Programming: The Case of Feature Models. In 35th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), IEEE Press, pp. 456-465. Munich-Germany, 18-22 July 2011.