Formal definition of syntax and semantics for documenting variability in activity diagrams

Quality assurance is an important issue in product line engineering. It is commonly agreed that quality assurance in domain engineering requires special attention, since a defect in a domain artifact can affect several products of a product line and can lead to high costs for defect correction. However, the variability in domain artifacts is a special challenge for quality assurance, since quality assurance approaches from single system engineering cannot handle the variability in domain artifacts. Therefore, the adaptation of existing approaches or the development of new approaches is necessary to support quality assurance in domain engineering. Activity diagrams are a widely accepted modeling language used to support quality assurance activities in single system engineering. However, current quality assurance approaches adapted for product line engineering using activity diagrams are not based on a formal syntax and semantics and therefore techniques based on these approaches are only automatable to a limited extent. In this paper, we propose a formal syntax and semantics for documenting variability in activity diagrams based on Petri-nets which provide the foundation for an automated support of quality assurance in domain engineering.