A Framework for Process Assessment of Software Product Line

Software product line has emerged as an attractive phenomenon within organizations dealing with software development process. It involves assembly of products from existing core assets, commonly known as components, and continuous growth in the core assets as production proceeds. Organizations trying to incorporate the concept of software product line to reduce development time and cost require certain rules to be followed for successful development and management, they also require a direct procedure to evaluate the current maturity level of the process. In this work certain rules for developing and managing a software product line are put forward. Additionally, a fuzzy logic based software product line process assessment tool (SPLPAT) has been designed and implemented on the basis of developed rules for software product line process assessment. SPLPAT can be used to assess the process maturity level of software product line, and it provides an opportunity to handle imprecision and uncertainty present in software process variables. Four case studies were conducted to validate the framework, and results show that SPLPAT provides a direct mechanism to evaluate current software product line process maturity level within an organization. The results of the developed software product line process assessment approach were compared with the existing CMM-level of the organization in order to evaluate the reliability of the presented approach and to find out how effectively an organization can execute software product line process when it has already achieved a certain CMM level

A Software Product Line Approach to Ontology-based Recommendations in E-Tourism Systems

This study tackles two concerns of developers of Tourism Information Systems (TIS). First is the need for more dependable recommendation services due to the intangible nature of the tourism product where it is impossible for customers to physically evaluate the services on offer prior to practical experience. Second is the need to manage dynamic user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the semantic web and mobile computing such that etourism systems (TIS) can evolve proactively with emerging user needs at minimal time and development cost without performance tradeoffs. However, TIS have very predictable characteristics and are functionally identical in most cases with minimal variations which make them attractive for software product line development. The Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) paradigm enables the strategic and systematic reuse of common core assets in the development of a family of software products that share some degree of commonality in order to realise a significant improvement in the cost and time of development. Hence, this thesis introduces a novel and systematic approach, called Product Line for Ontology-based Tourism Recommendation (PLONTOREC), a special approach focusing on the creation of variants of TIS products within a product line. PLONTOREC tackles the aforementioned problems in an engineering-like way by hybridizing concepts from ontology engineering and software product line engineering. The approach is a systematic process model consisting of product line management, ontology engineering, domain engineering, and application engineering. The unique feature of PLONTOREC is that it allows common TIS product requirements to be defined, commonalities and differences of content in TIS product variants to be planned and limited in advance using a conceptual model, and variant TIS products to be created according to a construction specification. We demonstrated the novelty in this approach using a case study of product line development of e-tourism systems for three countries in the West-African Region of Africa

Analyzing impact of experience curve on ROI in the software product line adoption process

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Context: Experience curve is a well-known concept in management and education science, which explains the phenomenon of increased worker efficiency with repetitive production of a good or service. Objective: We aim to analyze the impact of the experience curve effect on the Return on Investment (ROI) in the software product line engineering (SPLE) process. Method: We first present the results of a systematic literature review (SLR) to explicitly depict the studies that have considered the impact of experience curve effect on software development in general. Subsequently, based on the results of the SLR, the experience curve effect models in the literature, and the SPLE cost models, we define an approach for extending the cost models with the experience curve effect. Finally, we discuss the application of the refined cost models in a real industrial context. Results: The SLR resulted in 15 primary studies which confirm the impact of experience curve effect on software development in general but the experience curve effect in the adoption of SPLE got less attention. The analytical discussion of the cost models and the application of the refined SPLE cost models in the industrial context showed a clear impact of the experience curve effect on the time-to-market, cost of development and ROI in the SPLE adoption process. Conclusions: The proposed analysis with the newly defined cost models for SPLE adoption provides a more precise analysis tool for the management, and as such helps to support a better decision making. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Cost-effective feature placement of customizable multi-tenant applications in the cloud

Cloud computing technologies can be used to more flexibly provision application resources. By exploiting multi-tenancy, instances can be shared between users, lowering the cost of providing applications. A weakness of current cloud offerings however, is the difficulty of creating customizable applications that retain these advantages. In this article, we define a feature-based cloud resource management model, making use of Software Product Line Engineering techniques, where applications are composed of feature instances using a service-oriented architecture. We focus on how resources can be allocated in a cost-effective way within this model, a problem which we refer to as the feature placement problem. A formal description of this problem, that can be used to allocate resources in a cost-effective way, is provided. We take both the cost of failure to place features, and the cost of using servers into account, making it possible to take energy costs or the cost of public cloud infrastructure into consideration during the placement calculation. Four algorithms that can be used to solve the feature placement problem are defined. We evaluate the algorithm solutions, comparing them with the optimal solution determined using an integer linear problem solver, and evaluating the execution times of the algorithms, making use of both generated inputs and a use case based on three applications. We show that, using our approach a higher degree of multi-tenancy can be achieved, and that for the considered scenarios, taking the relationships between features into account and using application-oriented placement performs 25-40 % better than a purely feature-oriented placement

A Process Framework for Semantics-aware Tourism Information Systems

The growing sophistication of user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the Semantic Web and mobile computing has imposed new possibilities for improved intelligence in Tourism Information Systems (TIS). Traditional software engineering and web engineering approaches cannot suffice, hence the need to find new product development approaches that would sufficiently enable the next generation of TIS. The next generation of TIS are expected among other things to: enable semantics-based information processing, exhibit natural language capabilities, facilitate inter-organization exchange of information in a seamless way, and evolve proactively in tandem with dynamic user requirements. In this paper, a product development approach called Product Line for Ontology-based Semantics-Aware Tourism Information Systems (PLOSATIS) which is a novel hybridization of software product line engineering, and Semantic Web engineering concepts is proposed. PLOSATIS is presented as potentially effective, predictable and amenable to software process improvement initiatives

Automatic allocation of safety requirements to components of a software product line

Safety critical systems developed as part of a product line must still comply with safety standards. Standards use the concept of Safety Integrity Levels (SILs) to drive the assignment of system safety requirements to components of a system under design. However, for a Software Product Line (SPL), the safety requirements that need to be allocated to a component may vary in different products. Variation in design can indeed change the possible hazards incurred in each product, their causes, and can alter the safety requirements placed on individual components in different SPL products. Establishing common SILs for components of a large scale SPL by considering all possible usage scenarios, is desirable for economies of scale, but it also poses challenges to the safety engineering process. In this paper, we propose a method for automatic allocation of SILs to components of a product line. The approach is applied to a Hybrid Braking System SPL design