Searching the Variability Space to Fix Model Inconsistencies : A Preliminary Assessment

Recent years have witnessed a convergence between research in Software Product Lines (SPL) and Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) that leverages the complementary capabilities that both paradigms can offer. A crucial factor for the success of MDE is the availability of effective support for detecting and fixing inconsistencies among model elements. The importance of such support is attested by the extensive literature devoted to the topic. However, when MDE is coupled with SPL, the research focus has been devoted to inconsistency detection, while leaving fixing largely unexplored. To address this issue, a first step is locating where to apply the required fix(es) such that the necessary feature combinations of a product line are considered. It is not uncommon for the number of such feature combinations – variability space – to be quite large which renders unfeasible any exhaustive exploration. In this paper, we present early results of our ongoing work which relies on a basic search technique to effectively identify the places where the fixes should be placed. We evaluated our approach with sixty SPL examples.