Automatic promotional specialization, generalization and analysis of extended feature models with cardinalities in Alloy

Abstract

Software product line engineering is a method of producing a set of related products that share more commonalities than variability in a cost-effective approach. Software product lines provide systematic reuse within a product family. Extended feature models with cardinalities are widely used for managing variability and commonality in the software product line domains. In this paper, we use promotion technique in Alloy to formalize constraint based extended feature models with cardinalities and their specialization and generalization. This technique has a significant influence on applying analysis operations on feature models. To show the benefits of the promotion technique, we calculate the reuse ratio of a feature in a large scale software product line. In the presented method, in addition to feature and group cardinalities, we consider different combinations of cardinalities with each other as well as feature cloning.