Enabling Verifiable Conformance for Product Lines

NASA is, with the rest of industry, turning to product-line engineering to reduce costs and improve quality by effectively managing reuse. Experience in industry has shown that it is the verifiable conformance of each system to the product-line specifications that makes or breaks the product-line practice. Verification that the software for each project satisfies its intended product-line constraints is thus essential. This paper reports early results from aneffort to assemble from previous, industrial experience a set of enablers of verifiable conformance for use in the application engineering of NASA product lines. Lessons learned may be useful for developers of safety-critical, long-lived, or highly autonomous productlines, as well as for companies that integrate product line subsystems developed by multiple contractors.