The PLA model
Alexander von Rhein, Sven Apel, Christian Kästner, Thomas Thüm, Ina Schaefer · 2013
Product-line analysis has received considerable attention in the last decade. As it is often infeasible to analyze each product of a product line individually, researchers have developed analyses, called variability-aware analyses, that consider and exploit variability manifested in a code base. Variability-aware analyses are often significantly more efficient than traditional analyses, but each of them has certain weaknesses regarding applicability or scalability. We present the Product-Line-Analysis model, a formal model for the classification and comparison of existing analyses, including traditional and variability-aware analyses, and lay a foundation for formulating and exploring further, combined analyses. As a proof of concept, we discuss different examples of analyses in the light of our model, and demonstrate its benefits for systematic comparison and exploration of product-line analyses.