A Vision for Behavioural Model-Driven Validation of Software Product Lines

The Software Product Lines (SPLs) paradigm promises faster development cycles and increased quality by systematically reusing software assets. This paradigm considers a family of systems, each of which can be obtained by a selection of features in a variability model. Though essential, providing Quality Assurance (QA) techniques for SPLs has long been perceived as a very difficult challenge due to the combinatorics induced by variability and for which very few techniques were available. Recently, important progress has been made by the model-checking and testing communities to address this QA challenge, in a very disparate way though. We present our vision for a unified framework combining model-checking and testing approaches applied to behavioural models of SPLs. Our vision relies on Featured Transition Systems (FTSs), an extension of transition systems supporting variability. This vision is also based on model-driven technologies to support practical SPL modelling and orchestrate various QA scenarios. We illustrate one of such scenarios on a vending machine SPL.