On checking delta-oriented product lines of statecharts

A Software Product Line (SPL) is a set of programs, called variants, which are generated from a common artifact base. Delta-Oriented Programming (DOP) is a flexible approach to implement SPLs. In this article, we provide a foundation for rigorous development of delta-oriented product lines of statecharts. We introduce a core language for statecharts, we define DOP on top of it, we present an analysis ensuring that a product line is well-formed (i.e., all variants can be generated and are well-formed statecharts), and we illustrate how an implementation of the analysis has been applied to an industrial case study.