A variability management process for software product lines

ABSTRACT

The software product line approach (PL) promotes the generation of specific products from a set of core assets for a given domain. This approach is applicable to domains in which products have well-defined commonalities and variation points. Variability management is concerned with the management of the differences between products throughout the PL lifecycle. This paper presents a UML-based process for variability management that allows identification, representation and delimitation of variabilities as well as identification of mechanisms for variability implementation. The process is illustrated with excerpts of a case study carried out within the context of an existing PL for the Workflow Management System (WfMS) domain. The case study was carried out based on the experimental software engineering concepts. The results have shown that the proposed process has made explicit a higher number of variabilities than does the existing PL process, and it offers better support for variability tracing.

REFERENCES

• 1: {1} SEI - Software Engineering Institute. A framework for software product line practice 4.2. Pittsburgh. 〈http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/framework.html〉. Access: June, 01 2005.
• 2: {2} P. Heymans, J. C. Trigaux. Software product line: state of the art. Technical report for PLENTY project, Institut d'Informatique FUNDP, Namur, 2003.
• 3: Len Bass , Paul Clements , Rick Kazman, Software architecture in practice, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1998
• 4: Frank van der Linden, Software Product Families in Europe: The Esaps & Café Projects, IEEE Software, v.19 n.4, p.41-49, July 2002 [doi>10.1109/MS.2002.1020286 ]
• 5: Jilles Van Gurp , Jan Bosch , Mikael Svahnberg, On the Notion of Variability in Software Product Lines, Proceedings of the Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA'01), p.45, August 28-31, 2001 [doi>10.1109/WICSA.2001.948406]
• 6: {6} I. M. S. Gimenes, E. A. Oliveira Junior, F. R. Lazilha, L. M. Barroca. A product line architecture for work-flow management systems with component-based development, in: 2003 Proc. The IEEE Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, pp. 112-119.
• 7: {7} WfMC - Workflow Management Coalition. 〈http://www.wfmc.org〉. Access: June, 10 2004.
• 8: {8} K. Kang. Feature-oriented domain analysis (FODA) - feasibility study. Technical Report CMU/SEI-90-TR- 21, SEI/CMU, Pittsburgh, 1990.
• 9: {9} M. Simons, D. Creps, C. Klingler, L. Levine, D. Allemang. Organization domain modeling (ODM) guidebook, version 2.0. Technical Report STARS-VC-A025/001/00, Lockheed Martin Tactical Defence Systems, 1996.
• 10: {10} P. Sochos, I. Philippow, M. Riebish. Feature-oriented development of software product lines: mapping feature models to the architecture. Springer, LNCS 3263, 2004, pp. 138-152.
• 11: {11} K. Czarnecki, S. Helsen, U. Eisenecker. U. Staged configuration through specialization and multi-level configuration of feature models. To appear in special issue on "Software Variability: Process and Management," Software Process Improvement and Practice, 10(2), 2005.
• 12: Krzysztof Czarnecki , Ulrich W. Eisenecker, Generative programming: methods, tools, and applications, ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, 2000
• 13: {13} D. Batory. The Road to Utopia: A future for generative programming, in: Domain Specific Generation, Lengauer et al. (eds.), LNCS 3016, pp. 1-18, 2004.
• 14: Colin Atkinson , Joachim Bayer , Christian Bunse , Erik Kamsties , Oliver Laitenberger , Roland Laqua , Dirk Muthig , Barbara Paech , Jürgen Wüst , Jörg Zettel, Component-based product line engineering with UML, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2002
• 15: {15} M. Clauß, Modeling variability with UML. in: YOUNG RESEARCHES WORKSHOP, 2001, Erfurt. Proceedings... Erfurt. 2001.
• 16: Hassan Gomaa , Diana L. Webber, Modeling Adaptive and Evolvable Software Product Lines Using the Variation Point Model, Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04) - Track 9, p.90268.3, January 05-08, 2004
• 17: Ivar Jacobson , Martin Griss , Patrik Jonsson, Software reuse: architecture, process and organization for business success, ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, 1997
• 18: Maurizio Morisio , Guilherme H. Travassos , Michael E. Stark, Extending UML to Support Domain Analysis, Proceedings of the 15th IEEE international conference on Automated software engineering, p.321, September 11-15, 2000
• 19: {19} J. van Gurp, J. Bosch. Managing variability in software product lines. in: Proceedings of the Landelijk Architecture Congres. Amsterdam, 2000.
• 20: {20} C. Fritsch, A. Lehn, T. Strohm. Evaluating variability implementation mechanisms. in: INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON PRODUCT LINE ENGINEERING, 2., 2002, Seattle, USA. 2002. pp. 59-64.
• 21: Critina Gacek , Michalis Anastasopoules, Implementing product line variabilities, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.26 n.3, p.109-117, May 2001
• 22: {22} M. Becker. Towards a general model of variability in product families. in: SOFTWARE VARIABILITY MANAGEMENT WORKSHOP, 2003, Portland. pp. 19-27.
• 23: {23} IBM Rational Software - 〈http://www.ibm.com/software/rational〉 - Access: Nov. 2004.
• 24: Barbara Kitchenham , Lesley Pickard , Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Case Studies for Method and Tool Evaluation, IEEE Software, v.12 n.4, p.52-62, July 1995 [doi>10.1109/52.391832 ]
• 25: Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Experimental design and analysis in software engineering: Part 2: how to set up and experiment, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.20 n.1, p.22-26, Jan. 1995 [doi>10.1145/225907.225910]
• 26: {26} B. Kitchenham. DESMET: a method for evaluating software engineering methods and tools. Technical Report TR96-09, Keele, United Kingdom, 1996. 49 p.
• 27: {27} M. Clauß. Generic modeling using UML extensions for variability. in: OOPSLA 2001 WORKSHOP ON DOMAIN SPECIFIC VISUAL LANGUAGES, 1. 2001, Tampa Bay. USA, pp. 11-18.
• 28: Hassan Gomaa , Michael Eonsuk Shin, Multiple-View Meta-Modeling of Software Product Lines, Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems, p.238, December 02-04, 2002
• 29: Hassan Gomaa, Designing Software Product Lines with UML: From Use Cases to Pattern-Based Software Architectures, Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Redwood City, CA, 2004
• 30: {30} PURE-SYSTEMS - pure-variants: Variant Management - 〈http://web.pure-systems.com/Variant_Management.49.0.html〉 - Access: Nov. 2004.
• 31: {31} A. van der Hoek. Capturing product line architectures. In: INTERNATIONAL SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP, 4., 2000, Limerick. Proceedings... Limerick, 2000. pp. 95-99.
• 32: Giancarlo Succi , Jason Yip , Witold Pedrycz, Holmes: an intelligent system to support software product line development, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering, p.829-830, May 12-19, 2001, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• 33: {33} Cechticky, V., Passetti, A., Rohlik, O., Schaufelberger, W., XML-based feature modelling. In: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE REUSE, Madrid, Spain, pp. 101-114, LNCS 3107, Jul. 2004.
• 34: V R Basili , R W Selby , D H Hutchens, Experimentation in software engineering, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.12 n.7, p.733-743, July 1986
• 35: {35} M. Svahnberg; J. Van Gurp; J. Bosch. A taxonomy of variability realization techniques. Technical report, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, 2002.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.1 Project and People Management

Additional Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.7 COMPUTERS IN OTHER SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Consumer products

General Terms:
Design, Management, Measurement, Performance