108,117 research outputs found

    Agile Construction and Evolution of Product-Line Architectures

    Full text link
    Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) has proved to have significant advantages in family-based software development, but also implies the up¬front design of a product-line architecture (PLA) from which individual product applications can be engineered. The big upfront design associated with PLAs is in conflict with the current need of "being open to change". However, the turbulence of the current business climate makes change inevitable in order to stay competitive, and requires PLAs to be open to change even late in the development. The trend of "being open to change" is manifested in the Agile Software Development (ASD) paradigm, but it is spreading to the domain of SPLE. To reduce the big upfront design of PLAs as currently practiced in SPLE, new paradigms are being created, one being Agile Product Line Engineering (APLE). APLE aims to make the development of product-lines more flexible and adaptable to changes as promoted in ASD. To put APLE into practice it is necessary to make mechanisms available to assist and guide the agile construction and evolution of PLAs while complying with the "be open to change" agile principle. This thesis defines a process for "the agile construction and evolution of product-line architectures", which we refer to as Agile Product-Line Archi-tecting (APLA). The APLA process provides agile architects with a set of models for describing, documenting and tracing PLAs, as well as an algorithm to analyze change impact. Both the models and the change impact analysis offer the following capabilities: Flexibility & adaptability at the time of defining software architectures, enabling change during the incremental and iterative design of PLAs (anticipated or planned changes) and their evolution (unanticipated or unforeseen changes). Assistance in checking architectural integrity through change impact analysis in terms of architectural concerns, such as dependencies on earlier design decisions, rationale, constraints, and risks, etc.Guidance in the change decision-making process through change im¬pact analysis in terms of architectural components and connections. Therefore, APLA provides the mechanisms required to construct and evolve PLAs that can easily be refined iteration after iteration during the APLE development process. These mechanisms are provided in a modeling frame¬work called FPLA. The contributions of this thesis have been validated through the conduction of a project regarding a metering management system in electrical power networks. This case study took place in an i-smart software factory and was in collaboration with the Technical University of Madrid and Indra Software Labs. La Ingeniería de Líneas de Producto Software (Software Product Line Engi¬neering, SPLE) ha demostrado tener ventajas significativas en el desarrollo de software basado en familias de productos. SPLE es un paradigma que se basa en la reutilización sistemática de un conjunto de características comunes que comparten los productos de un mismo dominio o familia, y la personalización masiva a través de una variabilidad bien definida que diferencia unos productos de otros. Este tipo de desarrollo requiere el diseño inicial de una arquitectura de línea de productos (Product-Line Architecture, PLA) a partir de la cual los productos individuales de la familia son diseñados e implementados. La inversión inicial que hay que realizar en el diseño de PLAs entra en conflicto con la necesidad actual de estar continuamente "abierto al cam¬bio", siendo este cambio cada vez más frecuente y radical en la industria software. Para ser competitivos es inevitable adaptarse al cambio, incluso en las últimas etapas del desarrollo de productos software. Esta tendencia se manifiesta de forma especial en el paradigma de Desarrollo Ágil de Software (Agile Software Development, ASD) y se está extendiendo también al ámbito de SPLE. Con el objetivo de reducir la inversión inicial en el diseño de PLAs en la manera en que se plantea en SPLE, en los último años han surgido nuevos enfoques como la Ingeniera de Líneas de Producto Software Ágiles (Agile Product Line Engineering, APLE). APLE propone el desarrollo de líneas de producto de forma más flexible y adaptable a los cambios, iterativa e incremental. Para ello, es necesario disponer de mecanismos que ayuden y guíen a los arquitectos de líneas de producto en el diseño y evolución ágil de PLAs, mientras se cumple con el principio ágil de estar abierto al cambio. Esta tesis define un proceso para la "construcción y evolución ágil de las arquitecturas de lineas de producto software". A este proceso se le ha denominado Agile Product-Line Architecting (APLA). El proceso APLA proporciona a los arquitectos software un conjunto de modelos para de¬scribir, documentar y trazar PLAs, así como un algoritmo para analizar vel impacto del cambio. Los modelos y el análisis del impacto del cambio ofrecen: Flexibilidad y adaptabilidad a la hora de definir las arquitecturas software, facilitando el cambio durante el diseño incremental e iterativo de PLAs (cambios esperados o previstos) y su evolución (cambios no previstos). Asistencia en la verificación de la integridad arquitectónica mediante el análisis de impacto de los cambios en términos de dependencias entre decisiones de diseño, justificación de las decisiones de diseño, limitaciones, riesgos, etc. Orientación en la toma de decisiones derivadas del cambio mediante el análisis de impacto de los cambios en términos de componentes y conexiones. De esta manera, APLA se presenta como una solución para la construcción y evolución de PLAs de forma que puedan ser fácilmente refinadas iteración tras iteración de un ciclo de vida de líneas de producto ágiles. Dicha solución se ha implementado en una herramienta llamada FPLA (Flexible Product-Line Architecture) y ha sido validada mediante su aplicación en un proyecto de desarrollo de un sistema de gestión de medición en redes de energía eléctrica. Dicho proyecto ha sido desarrollado en una fábrica de software global en colaboración con la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid e Indra Software Labs

    Supporting the automated generation of modular product line safety cases

    Get PDF
    Abstract The effective reuse of design assets in safety-critical Software Product Lines (SPL) would require the reuse of safety analyses of those assets in the variant contexts of certification of products derived from the SPL. This in turn requires the traceability of SPL variation across design, including variation in safety analysis and safety cases. In this paper, we propose a method and tool to support the automatic generation of modular SPL safety case architectures from the information provided by SPL feature modeling and model-based safety analysis. The Goal Structuring Notation (GSN) safety case modeling notation and its modular extensions supported by the D-Case Editor were used to implement the method in an automated tool support. The tool was used to generate a modular safety case for an automotive Hybrid Braking System SPL

    Adaptive development and maintenance of user-centric software systems

    Get PDF
    A software system cannot be developed without considering the various facets of its environment. Stakeholders – including the users that play a central role – have their needs, expectations, and perceptions of a system. Organisational and technical aspects of the environment are constantly changing. The ability to adapt a software system and its requirements to its environment throughout its full lifecycle is of paramount importance in a constantly changing environment. The continuous involvement of users is as important as the constant evaluation of the system and the observation of evolving environments. We present a methodology for adaptive software systems development and maintenance. We draw upon a diverse range of accepted methods including participatory design, software architecture, and evolutionary design. Our focus is on user-centred software systems

    Product line architecture recovery with outlier filtering in software families: the Apo-Games case study

    Get PDF
    Software product line (SPL) approach has been widely adopted to achieve systematic reuse in families of software products. Despite its benefits, developing an SPL from scratch requires high up-front investment. Because of that, organizations commonly create product variants with opportunistic reuse approaches (e.g., copy-and-paste or clone-and-own). However, maintenance and evolution of a large number of product variants is a challenging task. In this context, a family of products developed opportunistically is a good starting point to adopt SPLs, known as extractive approach for SPL adoption. One of the initial phases of the extractive approach is the recovery and definition of a product line architecture (PLA) based on existing software variants, to support variant derivation and also to allow the customization according to customers’ needs. The problem of defining a PLA from existing system variants is that some variants can become highly unrelated to their predecessors, known as outlier variants. The inclusion of outlier variants in the PLA recovery leads to additional effort and noise in the common structure and complicates architectural decisions. In this work, we present an automatic approach to identify and filter outlier variants during the recovery and definition of PLAs. Our approach identifies the minimum subset of cross-product architectural information for an effective PLA recovery. To evaluate our approach, we focus on real-world variants of the Apo-Games family. We recover a PLA taking as input 34 Apo-Game variants developed by using opportunistic reuse. The results provided evidence that our automatic approach is able to identify and filter outlier variants, allowing to eliminate exclusive packages and classes without removing the whole variant. We consider that the recovered PLA can help domain experts to take informed decisions to support SPL adoption.This research was partially funded by INES 2.0; CNPq grants 465614/2014-0 and 408356/2018-9; and FAPESB grants JCB0060/2016 and BOL2443/201
    corecore