Survey of product-line verification and validation techniques

Abstract

This report presents the results from the first task of the SARP Center Initiative, "Product Line Verification of Safety-Critical Software." Task 1 is a literature survey of available techniques for product line verification and validation. Section 1 of the report provides an introduction to product lines and motivates the survey of verification techniques. It describes what is reused in product-line engineering and explains the goal of verifiable conformance of the developed system to its product-line specifications. Section 2 of the report describes six lifecycle steps in product-line verification and validation. This description is based on, and refers to, the best practices extracted from the readings. It ends with a list of verification challenges for NASA product lines (2. 7) and verification enablers for NASA product lines (2.8) derived from the survey. Section 3 provides resource lists of related conferences, workshops, industrial and defense industry experiences and case studies of product lines, and academic/industrial consortiums. Section 4 is a bibliography of papers and tutorials with annotated entries for relevant papers not previously discussed in sections 2 or 3.