Quality Assurance in the Presence of Variability - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 313

Quality Assurance in the Presence of Variability

Kim Lauenroth, Andreas Metzger, and Klaus Pohl

Abstract Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a reuse-driven develop-
ment paradigm that has been applied successfully in information system engineering
and other domains. Quality assurance of the reusable artifacts of the product line
(e.g. requirements, design, and code artifacts) is essential for successful product line
engineering. As those artifacts are reused in several products, a defect in a reusable
artifact can affect several products of the product line. A central challenge for qual-
ity assurance in product line engineering is how to consider product line variability.
Since the reusable artifacts contain variability, quality assurance techniques from
single-system engineering cannot directly be applied to those artifacts. Therefore,
different strategies and techniques have been developed for quality assurance in
the presence of variability. In this chapter, we describe those strategies and discuss
in more detail one of those strategies, the so called comprehensive strategy. The
comprehensive strategy aims at checking the quality of all possible products of the
product line and thus offers the highest benefits, since it is able to uncover defects in
all possible products of the product line. However, the central challenge for applying
the comprehensive strategy is the complexity that results from the product line vari-
ability and the large number of potential products of a product line. In this chapter,
we present one concrete technique that we have developed to implement the com-
prehensive strategy that addresses this challenge. The technique is based on model
checking technology and allows for a comprehensive verification of domain artifacts
against temporal logic properties.

1 Introduction

Colette Rolland is a world-known leader in the information systems community
well known for her significant contributions, among others, in the areas of method
engineering [ 20 -22] and goal-oriented requirements engineering [ 23, 26, 27] . Her