Software product line engineering (SPLE) aims at developing a family of systems by reuse in order to reduce time to market and to increase product quality. The correctness of the development artifacts intended for reuse as well as the correctness of the developed products is of crucial interest for many safety-critical or business-critical applications. Formal methods and analysis approaches have been successfully applied in single system engineering over the last years in order to rigorously establish critical system requirements. However, in SPLE, formal methods and analysis approaches are not broadly applied yet, despite their potential to improve product quality. One of the reasons is that existing formal approaches from single system engineering do not consider variability, an essential aspect of product lines.
The objective of the workshop "Formal Methods and Analysis in Software Product Line Engineering (FMSPLE)" is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the SPLE community with researchers and practitioners working in the area of formal methods and analysis. So far, both communities are only loosely connected, despite very promising initial work on formal analysis techniques for software product lines. The workshop aims at reviewing the state of the art and the state of the practice in which formal methods and analysis approaches are currently applied in SPLE. This leads to a discussion of a research agenda for the extension of existing formal approaches and the development of new formal techniques for dealing with the particular needs of SPLE. To achieve the above objectives, the workshop is intended as a highly interactive event fostering discussion and initiating collaborations between the participants from both communities.
The proposed workshop focuses on the application of formal methods and analysis approaches in all phases of SPLE, including domain and application engineering, in order to ensure the correctness of individual artifacts as well as the consistency among them. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
The FMSPLE workshop will be a full-day event, starting with a keynote presentation. The keynote will be followed by presentations of selected peer-reviewed papers.