State-Based Modeling to Support the Evolution and Maintenance of Safety-Critical Software Product Lines

Changes to safety-critical product lines can jeopardize the safety properties that they must ensure. Thus, evolving software product lines must consider the impact that changes to requirements may have on the existing systems and their safety. The contribution of this work is a systematic, tool-supported technique to support safe evolution of product-line requirements using a model-based approach. We show how the potential feature interactions that need to be modeled are scoped and identified with the aid of product-line software fault tree analysis. Further, we show how reuse of the state-based models is effectively exploited in the evolution phase of product-line engineering. To illustrate this approach, we apply our technique to the evolution of a safety-critical cardiac pacemaker product line