Applying Declarative Analysis to Industrial Automotive Software Product Line Models

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are families of related software products developed from a common set of artifacts. Most existing analysis tools cannot be applied to an entire SPL, but rather must be applied an SPL’s products one at a time. Some tools have been redesigned or re-implemented to support the kind of variability exhibited in SPLs, but this usually takes a lot of effort and is error-prone. Declarative analyses written in languages like Datalog have been collectively lifted to SPLs in prior work, which enables the application of existing declarative analyses to SPLs.In this paper, we apply five declarative analyses (behaviour alteration, re-cusion analysis, simplifiable global variable analysis, and two of their variants) to a set of automotive software product lines from General Motors. We discuss the design of the analysis pipeline used in this process, present its scalability results, and provide a means to visualize the analysis results for a subset of products filtered by feature expression. We also reflect on some of the lessons learned throughout this project.