Software diversity: state of the art and perspectives

International audienceDiversity is prevalent in modern software systems to facilitate adapting the software to customer requirements or the execution environment. Diversity has an impact on all phases of the software development process. Appropriate means and organizational structures are required to deal with the additional complexity introduced by software variability. This introductory article to the special section "Software Diversity--Modeling, Analysis and Evolution" provides an overview of the current state of the art in diverse systems development and discusses challenges and potential solutions. The article covers requirements analysis, design, implementation, verification and validation, maintenance and evolution as well as organizational aspects. It also provides an overview of the articles which are part of this special section and addresses particular issues of diverse systems development

Model-checking the preservation of temporal properties upon feature integration

AbstractModel checking is a popular technique for proving properties of systems. When systems are updated with new features, however, one would like to avoid having to re-run the model checking procedure on properties which were true before the update, in order to check that they are still true afterwards. This paper proposes a technique which, in certain circumstances, enables such additional checks to be avoided