204,812 research outputs found
Engineering Management Approach to Software Production Plan, based on the Principles of Software Product Lines
The concept of the software factory and discussions over its realization dates back more than three decades; however it is still only a vision for medium and large size Information Technology [IT] organizations on an earnest journey for software excellence. The principles and practices of Software Product Lines [SPL] can be a catalyst in realizing such a vision. SPL ensembles three elements namely, core asset development, product development, and management to run an efficient and consistent software factory. The core asset development is based on âDomain Engineeringâ and is fundamental to leveraging commonalties between software products & services developed. The product development encircles the core assets and provides the variability required in the product line. Finally, management acts as the strategic objective provider. Employing these principles of SPL, a software production plan can be devised with five essential practice areas such as Configuration Management; Data Collection, Metrics and Tracking; Process Definition; Technical Planning; and Tool Support.
Configuration Management is a disciplined approach of evaluating, coordinating, approving or disapproving and finally implementing changes in the software artifacts. Data Collection, Metrics and Tracking enable the software factory to assure quality and seek continuous improvements. Process Definition ensures the software factory is scientific in its approach and delivers repeatable performance. Technical Planning chalks the roadmap of realizing the prophecy of reusability and fulfilling the software factory vision. Finally proper Tool Support ensures productivity, efficiency and consistent performance from all the stakeholders in the software factory
Industrialising Software Development in Systems Integration
Compared to other disciplines, software engineering as of today is still dependent on craftsmanship of highly-skilled workers. However, with constantly increasing complexity and efforts, existing software engineering approaches appear more and more inefficient. A paradigm shift towards industrial production methods seems inevitable.
Recent advances in academia and practice have lead to the availability of industrial key principles in software development as well. Specialization is represented in software product lines, standardization and systematic reuse are available with component-based development, and automation has become accessible through model-driven engineering. While each of the above is well researched in theory, only few cases of successful implementation in the industry are known. This becomes even more evident in specialized areas of software engineering such as systems integration.
Todayâs IT systems need to quickly adapt to new business requirements due to mergers and acquisitions and cooperations between enterprises. This certainly leads to integration efforts, i.e. joining different subsystems into a cohesive whole in order to provide new functionality. In such an environment. the application of industrial methods for software development seems even more important. Unfortunately, software development in this field is a highly complex and heterogeneous undertaking, as IT environments differ from customer to customer. In such settings, existing industrialization concepts would never break even due to one-time projects and thus insufficient economies of scale and scope. This present thesis, therefore, describes a novel approach for a more efficient implementation of prior key principles while considering the characteristics of software development for systems integration.
After identifying the characteristics of the field and their affects on currently-known industrialization concepts, an organizational model for industrialized systems integration has thus been developed. It takes software product lines and adapts them in a way feasible for a systems integrator active in several business domains. The result is a three-tiered model consolidating recurring activities and reducing the efforts for individual product lines. For the implementation of component-based development, the present thesis assesses current component approaches and applies an integration metamodel to the most suitable one. This ensures a common understanding of systems integration across different product lines and thus alleviates component reuse, even across product line boundaries. The approach is furthermore aligned with the organizational model to depict in which way component-based development may be applied in industrialized systems integration. Automating software development in systems integration with model-driven engineering was found to be insufficient in its current state. The reason herefore lies in insufficient tool chains and a lack of modelling standards. As an alternative, an XML-based configuration of products within a software product line has been developed. It models a product line and its products with the help of a domain-specific language and utilizes stylesheet transformations to generate compliable artefacts.
The approach has been tested for its feasibility within an exemplarily implementation following a real-world scenario. As not all aspects of industrialized systems integration could be simulated in a laboratory environment, the concept was furthermore validated during several expert interviews with industry representatives. Here, it was also possible to assess cultural and economic aspects.
The thesis concludes with a detailed summary of the contributions to the field and suggests further areas of research in the context of industrialized systems integration
Detecting and Explaining Conflicts in Attributed Feature Models
Product configuration systems are often based on a variability model. The
development of a variability model is a time consuming and error-prone process.
Considering the ongoing development of products, the variability model has to
be adapted frequently. These changes often lead to mistakes, such that some
products cannot be derived from the model anymore, that undesired products are
derivable or that there are contradictions in the variability model. In this
paper, we propose an approach to discover and to explain contradictions in
attributed feature models efficiently in order to assist the developer with the
correction of mistakes. We use extended feature models with attributes and
arithmetic constraints, translate them into a constraint satisfaction problem
and explore those for contradictions. When a contradiction is found, the
constraints are searched for a set of contradicting relations by the
QuickXplain algorithm.Comment: In Proceedings FMSPLE 2015, arXiv:1504.0301
Time-Space Efficient Regression Testing for Configurable Systems
Configurable systems are those that can be adapted from a set of options.
They are prevalent and testing them is important and challenging. Existing
approaches for testing configurable systems are either unsound (i.e., they can
miss fault-revealing configurations) or do not scale. This paper proposes
EvoSPLat, a regression testing technique for configurable systems. EvoSPLat
builds on our previously-developed technique, SPLat, which explores all
dynamically reachable configurations from a test. EvoSPLat is tuned for two
scenarios of use in regression testing: Regression Configuration Selection
(RCS) and Regression Test Selection (RTS). EvoSPLat for RCS prunes
configurations (not tests) that are not impacted by changes whereas EvoSPLat
for RTS prunes tests (not configurations) which are not impacted by changes.
Handling both scenarios in the context of evolution is important. Experimental
results show that EvoSPLat is promising. We observed a substantial reduction in
time (22%) and in the number of configurations (45%) for configurable Java
programs. In a case study on a large real-world configurable system (GCC),
EvoSPLat reduced 35% of the running time. Comparing EvoSPLat with sampling
techniques, 2-wise was the most efficient technique, but it missed two bugs
whereas EvoSPLat detected all bugs four times faster than 6-wise, on average.Comment: 14 page
Variability Abstractions: Trading Precision for Speed in Family-Based Analyses (Extended Version)
Family-based (lifted) data-flow analysis for Software Product Lines (SPLs) is
capable of analyzing all valid products (variants) without generating any of
them explicitly. It takes as input only the common code base, which encodes all
variants of a SPL, and produces analysis results corresponding to all variants.
However, the computational cost of the lifted analysis still depends inherently
on the number of variants (which is exponential in the number of features, in
the worst case). For a large number of features, the lifted analysis may be too
costly or even infeasible. In this paper, we introduce variability abstractions
defined as Galois connections and use abstract interpretation as a formal
method for the calculational-based derivation of approximate (abstracted)
lifted analyses of SPL programs, which are sound by construction. Moreover,
given an abstraction we define a syntactic transformation that translates any
SPL program into an abstracted version of it, such that the analysis of the
abstracted SPL coincides with the corresponding abstracted analysis of the
original SPL. We implement the transformation in a tool, reconfigurator that
works on Object-Oriented Java program families, and evaluate the practicality
of this approach on three Java SPL benchmarks.Comment: 50 pages, 10 figure
Towards Product Lining Model-Driven Development Code Generators
A code generator systematically transforms compact models to detailed code.
Today, code generation is regarded as an integral part of model-driven
development (MDD). Despite its relevance, the development of code generators is
an inherently complex task and common methodologies and architectures are
lacking. Additionally, reuse and extension of existing code generators only
exist on individual parts. A systematic development and reuse based on a code
generator product line is still in its infancy. Thus, the aim of this paper is
to identify the mechanism necessary for a code generator product line by (a)
analyzing the common product line development approach and (b) mapping those to
a code generator specific infrastructure. As a first step towards realizing a
code generator product line infrastructure, we present a component-based
implementation approach based on ideas of variability-aware module systems and
point out further research challenges.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on
Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development, pp. 539-545, Angers,
France, SciTePress, 201
- âŠ