A systematic literature review on the semi-automatic configuration of extended product lines

Product line engineering has become essential in mass customisation given its ability to reduce production costs and time to market, and to improve product quality and customer satisfaction. In product line literature, mass customisation is known as product configuration. Currently, there are multiple heterogeneous contributions in the product line configuration domain. However, a secondary study that shows an overview of the progress, trends, and gaps faced by researchers in this domain is still missing. In this context, we provide a comprehensive systematic literature review to discover which approaches exist to support the configuration process of extended product lines and how these approaches perform in practice. Extend product lines consider non-functional properties in the product line modelling. We compare and classify a total of 66 primary studies from 2000 to 2016. Mainly, we give an in-depth view of techniques used by each work, how these techniques are evaluated and their main shortcomings. As main results, our review identified (i) the need to improve the quality of the evaluation of existing approaches, (ii) a lack of hybrid solutions to support multiple configuration constraints, and (iii) a need to improve scalability and performance conditions

Automating Resource Selection and Configuration in Inter-clouds through a Software Product Line Method

International audienceNowadays, cloud users face three important problems: (a) choosing one or more appropriate cloud provider(s) to run their application(s), (b) selecting appropriate cloud resources, which implies having enough information about the available resources, including their characteristics and constraints, and (c) configuring the cloud resources. These problems are mostly due to the wide range of resources. These resources usually have distinct dependencies, and they are offered at various clouds' layers. In this complex scenario, the users often have to handle cloud resources and their dependencies manually. This is an error-prone and time-consuming activity, even for skilled cloud users and system administrators. In this context, this paper proposes a software product line engineering (SPLE) method and a tool to deal with these issues. Our SPL-based engineering method enables a declarative and goal-oriented strategy. Furthermore, it allows resource selection and configuration in inter-cloud environments. In our proposal, the cloud users specify their applications and requirements, and our tool automatically selects and configures a suitable computing environment, taking into account temporal and functional dependencies. Experimental results on Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine (GCE) show that our approach enables unskilled users to have access to advanced inter-cloud computing configurations, without being concerned with the characteristics of each cloud

Feature-family-based reliability analysis of software product lines

Tese (doutorado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Departamento de Ciência da Computação, 2017.Contexto: Técnicas de verificação têm sido aplicadas para garantir que sistemas de software atinjam níveis de qualidade desejados e atenda a requisitos funcionais e nãofuncionais. Entretanto a aplicação dessas técnicas de verificação em linhas de produto de software é desafiador devido à explosão combinatorial do número de produtos que uma linha de produtos pode instanciar. As técnicas atuais de verificação de linhas de produtos utilizam model checking simbólico e informações sobre variabilidade para otimizar a análise, mas ainda apresentam limitações que as tornam onerosas ou inviáveis. Em particular, as técnicas de verificação do estado da arte para análise de confiabilidade em linhas de produto são enumerativas o que dificulta a aplicabilidade das mesmas devido à explosão combinatorial do espaço de configurações. Objetivo: Os objetivos dessa tese são os seguintes: (a) apresentar um método eficiente para calcular a confiabilidade de todas as configurações de uma linha de produtos de sotware composicional ou anotacional à partir de seus modelos comportamentais UML, (b) fornecer uma ferramenta que implemente o método proposto e, (c) relatar um estudo empírico comparando o desempenho de diferentes estratégias de análises de confiabilidade para linhas de produto de software. Método: Esse trabalho apresenta uma nova estratégia de análise feature-family-based para calcular a confiabilidade de todos os produtos de uma linha de produtos de software (composicional ou anotacional). O passo feature-based da estratégia divide os modelos comportamentais em unidades menores para que essas possam ser analisadas mais eficientemente. O passo family-based realiza o cálculo de confiabilidade para todas as configurações de uma só vez ao avaliar as expressões de confiabilidade em termos de uma estrutura de dados variacional adequada. Resultados: Os resulstados empíricos mostram que a estratégia feature-family-based para análise de confiabilidade supera, em termos de tempo e espaço, quatro outras estratéfias de análise do estado da arte (product-based, family-based, feature-product-based e family-product-based) para a mesma propriedade. No contexto da avaliação e em comparação com as outras estratégias, a estratégia feature-family-based foi a única capaz de escalar a um crescimento do espaço de configuração da ordem de 220. Conclusões: A estratégia feature-family-based utiliza e se beneficia das estratégias feature- e family- ao domar o crescimento dos tamanhos dos modelos a serem analizados e por evitar a enumeração de produtos inerentes a alguns métodos de análise do estado da arte.Context: Verification techniques are being applied to ensure that software systems achieve desired quality levels and fulfill functional and non-functional requirements. However, applying these techniques to software product lines is challenging, given the exponential blowup of the number of products. Current product-line verification techniques leverage symbolic model checking and variability information to optimize the analysis, but still face limitations that make them costly or infeasible. In particular, state-of-the-art verification techniques for product-line reliability analysis are enumerative which hinders their applicability, given the latent exponential blowup of the configuration space. Objective: The objectives of this thesis are the following: (a) we present a method to eciently compute the reliability of all configurations of a compositional or annotationbased software product line from its UML behavioral models, (b) we provide a tool that implements the proposed method, and (c) we report on an empirical study comparing the performance of dierent reliability analysis strategies for software product lines. Method: We present a novel feature-family-based analysis strategy to compute the reliability of all products of a (compositional or annotation-based) software product line. The feature-based step of our strategy divides the behavioral models into smaller units that can be analyzed more eciently. The family-based step performs the reliability computation for all configurations at once by evaluating reliability expressions in terms of a suitable variational data structure. Results: Our empirical results show that our feature-family-based strategy for reliability analysis outperforms, in terms of time and space, four state-of-the-art strategies (product-based, family-based, feature-product-based, and family-product-based) for the same property. In the evaluation’s context and in comparison with the other evaluation strategies, it is the only one that could be scaled to a 220-fold increase in the size of the configuration space. Conclusion: Our feature-family-based strategy leverages both feature- and familybased strategies by taming the size of the models to be analyzed and by avoiding the products enumeration inherent to some state-of-the-art analysis methods