Zen-CC: An Automated and Incremental Conformance Checking Solution to Support Interactive Product Configuration

In the context of product line engineering (PLE), providing immediate feedback on the correctness of a manual configuration step to users has a practical impact on whether a configuration process with tool support can be successfully adopted in practice. Model-based PLE has brought opportunities to enable automated product configuration and derivation for large-scale systems/software, in which models are used as the abstract specification of commonalities and variabilities of products of a product line. In our previous work, we have proposed a UML-based variability modeling methodology and an interactive configuration process. Based on these work, in this paper, we propose an automated and incremental conformance checking approach to ensure that the manual configuration to each variation point conforms to a set of pre-defined conformance rules specified in OCL. The proposed approach, called Zen-CC is implemented as a component of our product configuration and derivation tool, named as Zen-Configurator. The proposed approach is evaluated with two real-world case studies and results showed that the performance of Zen-CC is significantly better than a baseline algorithm checking all the conformance rules at each configuration step. Moreover, the performance of Zen-CC rarely varies during the configuration process, suggesting that our approach is scalable for configuring products with a large number of configuration points.