Strategies for analyzing configurable systems

Abstract

The advent of variability management and generator technology enables users to derive individual system variants from a given configurable system just based on a selection of desired configuration options. To cope with the possibly huge configuration space, researchers have been developing analysis techniques that follow different strategies to incorporate (static) variability. We discuss different strategies (variability-aware analysis and sampling) and evaluate them in different settings (model checking, type checking, and liveness analysis). A key finding is that variability-aware analysis outperforms most sampling approaches with respect to analysis time while being able to make definite statements about all variants of a configurable system.