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Type-Checking Software Product Lines - A Formal Approach

Published: 15 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

A software product line (SPL) is an efficient means to generate a family of program variants for a domain from a single code base. However, because of the potentially high number of possible program variants, it is difficult to test all variants and ensure properties like type-safety for the entire SPL. While first steps to type-check an entire SPL have been taken, they are informal and incomplete. In this paper, we extend the Featherweight Java (FJ) calculus with feature annotations to be used for SPLs. By extending FJ's type system, we guarantee that - given a well-typed SPL - all possible program variants are well- typed as well. We show how results from this formalization reflect and help implementing our own language-independent SPL tool CIDE.

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cover image Guide Proceedings
ASE '08: Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
September 2008
538 pages
ISBN:9781424421879

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IEEE Computer Society

United States

Publication History

Published: 15 September 2008

Author Tags

  1. Featherweight Java calculus
  2. feature annotation
  3. formal approach
  4. program variants
  5. software product lines
  6. type checking
  7. type safety
  8. type system

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