A Petri-Net Based Approach of Software Visualization for Software Customization

Different from the traditional approach of software development from scratch, Software Product Line (SPL) allows software customization. When further supported by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), SPL offers unprecedented advantages for reusing software artifacts in mass customization of software applications, leading to radically reduced time, cost, and effort of software development. Accordingly, an interactive dialogue-based system for ontology-based requirement elicitation has been developed previously, in our research group, by Zhang. This thesis works on enhancement of the prior work by introducing software visualization to the process of interactive requirement elicitation. A research was conducted for choosing the most suitable visualization method for the existing text-based software. For this purpose, a layered structure for SOA visualization with support of Petri Nets is chosen. Accordingly, this method was implemented and a usability study was done to validate improvements in comprehension of the end-user in visualized version comparing to the previous version of requirement elicitation system

An Interactive Approach to Software Visualization for Customization

The Software Product Line (SPL) provides software customization by composing several different web services together. When further supported by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), SPL offers unprecedented advantages for reusing software artifacts in mass customization of software applications, leading to radically reduced time, cost, and effort of software development. A Petri-Net based visualization system for the software customization has been developed in our research group. This thesis works on enhancement of the prior work by introducing an interactive approach of software visualization for software customization. The proposed approach segregates the users based on their interaction with the system and the best suited visualizations are selected and displayed for the users. In this thesis an interactive framework based on Contextual Control Model has been proposed. A usability study has been conducted to validate the improvements in the usability of the proposed system compared to the existing system