The PLA Model: On the Combination of Product-Line Analyses

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (A. von Rhein, S. Apel, C. Kästner, T. Thüm, I. Schaefer)
Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:48:21 GMT

Alexander von Rhein, Sven Apel, Christian Kästner, Thomas Thüm, and Ina Schaefer. The PLA Model: On the Combination of Product-Line Analyses. In Proceedings of the 7th Int'l Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems (VaMoS), ISBN 978-1-4503-1541-8, pages 14:1--14:8, New York, NY: ACM Press, January 2013.

Product-line analysis has received considerable attention in the past. As it is often infeasible to analyze each product of a product line individually, researchers have developed analyses, called variability-aware analyses, that consider and exploit variability manifested in a code base. Variability-aware analyses are often significantly more efficient than traditional analyses, but each of them has certain weaknesses regarding applicability or scalability, as we discuss in this paper. We present the Product-Line-Analysis Model, a formal model for the classification and comparison of existing analyses, including traditional and variability-aware analyses, and lay a foundation for formulating and exploring further, combined analyses. As a proof of concept, we discuss different examples of analyses in the light of our model, and demonstrate its benefits for systematic comparison and exploration of product-line analyses.