Automatic generation of SPL structurally valid products: An approach based on progressive composition of partial configurations

Software product line is a recent discipline in software engineering. It mainly intends to rationalize the process of developing highly similar systems by a strategic and planned software reuse beforehand. One major contribution of this paradigm is the introduction of feature diagram allowing the management of the variability. It provides a framework for modeling reusable components and ensures their appropriate incorporation. This is a graphical tree-like notation that shows the hierarchical organization of features and specify theirs dependencies. With a large number of features, the generation of all valid products is extremely difficult. In fact, the wide variability defined leads to combinatorial explosion of the number of possible combinations. So, exhaustive testing is rarely feasible in practice. To remedy this problem, we propose in this paper an automatic tool allowing the avoidance of the search space exploration. It proceeds by a progressive construction of partial configurations. From the elementary features, the idea is to gradually build larger combinations until obtaining the desired products. This treatment is based principally on an ascending exploration of the feature diagram. The proposed techniques are set up based on the graph transformations approach and the developed grammars are implemented using AToM³ environment. An illustrative example is presented.