Towards detecting redundancy in domain engineering process using first order logic rules

Software product line SPL is an emerging methodology for developing software products. SPL consists of two processes: domain-engineering and application-engineering. Successful software product is highly dependent on the validity of a domain engineering process. Therefore, validation is a significant process within the domain-engineering. Anomalies such as dead feature, redundancy, and wrong-cardinality are well-known problems in SPL. In the literature, redundancy did not take the signs of attentions as a dead feature and wrong-cardinality. The maturity of the SPL can be enhanced by detecting and removing the redundancy from the domain engineering. This paper proposes first order logic FOL rules for detecting the redundancy in domain-engineering process. Detecting redundancy in the domain engineering direct is our contribution. Our methodology comprised of three steps: 1 variability is modelled in the form of predicates as a prerequisite; 2 for each type of the redundancy, a general form is formulated to swathe all possible cases; 3 FOL rules are illustrated to implement each possibility based on deducing the results from predefined cases. As a result, all forms of redundancies in the domain-engineering process are amorphous. Finally, experiments are conducted to attest the scalability of our method.

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