Context. Variability-intensive programs (program families) appear in many
application areas and for many reasons today. Different family members, called
variants, are derived by switching statically configurable options (features)
on and off, while reuse of the common code is maximized.
Inquiry. Verification of program families is challenging since the number of
variants is exponential in the number of features. Existing single-program
analysis and verification tools cannot be applied directly to program families,
and designing and implementing the corresponding variability-aware versions is
tedious and laborious.
Approach. In this work, we propose a range of variability-related
transformations for translating program families into single programs by
replacing compile-time variability with run-time variability (non-determinism).
The obtained transformed programs can be subsequently analyzed using the
conventional off- the-shelf single-program analysis tools such as type
checkers, symbolic executors, model checkers, and static analyzers.
Knowledge. Our variability-related transformations are outcome-preserving,
which means that the relation between the outcomes in the transformed single
program and the union of outcomes of all variants derived from the original
program family is equality.
Grounding. We show our transformation rules and their correctness with
respect to a minimal core imperative language IMP. Then, we discuss our
experience of implementing and using the transformations for efficient and
effective analysis and verification of real-world C program families.
Importance. We report some interesting variability-related bugs that we
discovered using various state-of-the-art single-program C verification tools,
such as Frama-C, Clang, LLBMC.Comment: The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming, Vol. 1, Issue 1,
Article