An extension of the ABS toolchain with a mechanism for type checking SPLs

A Software Product Line (SPL) is a set of similar programs, called variants, with a common code base and well documented variability. Because the number of variants in an SPL can be large, checking them efficiently (e.g., to ensure that they are all well-typed) is a challenging problem. Delta-Oriented Programming (DOP) is a flexible approach to implement SPLs. The Abstract Behavioral Specification (ABS) modeling language and toolchain supports delta-oriented SPLs. In this paper we present an extension of the ABS toolchain with a mechanism for checking that all the variants of an SPL can be generated and are well-typed ABS programs. Currently we have implemented only part of this mechanism: our implementation (integrated in version 1.4.2 of the ABS toolchain and released in April 2017) checks whether all variants can be generated, however it does not check, in particular, whether the bodies of the methods are well-typed. Empirical evaluation shows that the current implementation allows for efficient partial type checking of existing ABS SPLs.