Interfaces for modular feature verification

Abstract

Feature-oriented programming organizes programs around features rather than objects, thus better supporting extensible, product-line architectures. Programming languages increasingly support this style of programming, but programmers get little support from verification tools. Ideally, programmers should be able to verify features independently of each other and use automated compositional reasoning techniques to infer properties of a system from properties of its features. Achieving this requires carefully designed interfaces: they must hold sufficient information to enable compositional verification, yet tools should be able to generate this information automatically because experience indicates programmers cannot or will not provide it manually. We present a model of interfaces that supports automated, compositional, feature-oriented model checking. To demonstrate their utility, we automatically detect the feature-interaction problems originally found manually by R. Hall in an email suite case study.