Language-Independent Reference Checking in Software Product Lines

by Sven Apel, Wolfgang Scholz, Christian Lengauer, and Christian Kästner

In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD), pages 64–71. ACM Press, 2010.

Abstract

\emphFeature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD) is a paradigm for the development of software product lines. A challenge in FOSD is to guarantee that all software systems of a software product line are correct. Recent work on type checking product lines can provide a guarantee of type correctness without generating all possible systems. We generalize previous results by abstracting from the specifics of particular programming languages. In a first attempt, we present a reference-checking algorithm that performs key tasks of product-line type checking independently of the target programming language. Experiments with two sample product lines written in Java and C are encouraging and give us confidence that this approach is promising.

Citation as BibTeX

@inproceedings{apel10language-independent,
  author = {Apel, Sven and Scholz, Wolfgang and Lengauer, Christian and Kästner, Christian},
  title = {Language-Independent Reference Checking in Software Product Lines},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD)},
  publisher = {ACM Press},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  location = {Eindhoven, The Netherlands},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-0208-1},
  month = {oct},
  year = {2010},
  pages = {64–71},
  url = {http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7eckaestne/pdf/FOSD10-ftweezer.pdf},
  month_numeric = {10}
}