MIP-1212

Paper Description

BibTeX entry

@incollection{MIP-1212,
author={J. Liebig, A. von Rhein, C. Kästner, S. Apel, J. Dörre, C. Lengauer},
title={{Large-Scale Variability-Aware Type Checking and Dataflow Analysis}},
institution={{Fakult{\"a}t f{\"u}r Informatik und Mathematik, Universit{\"a}t Passau}},
year={2012},
number={MIP-1212}
}

Abstract

A software product line is a family of similiar software products that share a common set of assets. The advent of proper variability management and generator technology enables end-users to derive individual products solely based on a selection of desired features. This gives rise to a huge configuration space of possible products. But the high degree of variability comes at a cost: classic analysis methods do not scale any more; there are simply too many potential products to analyze. Hence, researchers have begun to develop variability-aware analyses, which exploit the similarities of the products of a product line to reduce analysis effort. However, while being promising, variability-aware analyses have not been applied to real-world product lines so far. We close this gap by developing and applying two full-fledged analyses to two real-world, large-scale systems: the Busybox tool suite and the Linux kernel. We report on our experience with making variability-aware analysis ready for the real world, and with applying it to large-scale product lines. A key result is that variability-aware analysis can outperform even very limited sampling heuristics with respect to analysis time.

Paper itself

MIP-1212.pdf