The Influence of Software Module Systems on Modular Verification

The effectiveness of modular model checking for hardware makes it tempting to apply these techniques to software. Existing modular techniques have been driven by the parallel-composition semantics of hardware. New architectures for software, however, combine sequential and parallel composition. These new, feature-oriented, architectures mandate developing new methodologies. They repay the effort by yielding better modular verification techniques.This paper demonstrates the impact of feature-oriented architectures on modular model checking. We have implemented an explicit-state model checker and applied it to a real software system to validate our prior, theoretical work on feature-oriented verification. Our study highlights three results. First, it confirms that the state-space overhead arising from our methodology is minimal. Second, it demonstrates that feature-oriented architectures reduce the need for the property decompositions that often plague modular verification. Third, it reveals that, independent of our methodology, feature-oriented designs inherently control state-space explosion.