Verifying cross-cutting features as open systems.

ABSTRACTFeature-oriented software designs capture many interesting notions of cross-cutting, and offer a powerful method for building product-line architectures. Each cross-cutting feature is an independent module that fundamentally yields an open system from a verification perspective. We describe desiderata for verifying such modules through model checking and find that existing work on the verification of open systems fails to address most of the concerns that arise from feature-oriented systems. We therefore provide a new methodology for verifying such systems. To validate this new methodology, we have implemented it and applied it to a suite of modules that exhibit feature interaction problems. Our model checker was able to automatically locate ten problems previously found through a laborious simulation-based effort.