Modes in component behavior specification via EBP and their application in product lines

The concept of software product lines (SPL) is a modern approach to software development simplifying construction of related variants of a product thus lowering development costs and shortening time-to-market. In SPL, software components play an important role. In this paper, we show how the original idea of component mode can be captured and further developed in behavior specification via the formalism of extended behavior protocols (EBP). Moreover, we demonstrate how the modes in behavior specification can be used for modeling behavior of an entire product line. The main benefits include (i) the existence of a single behavior specification capturing the behavior of all product variants, and (ii) automatic verification of absence of communication errors among the cooperating components taking the variability into account. These benefits are demonstrated on a part of a non-trivial case study.