26 research outputs found
A Product Line Systems Engineering Process for Variability Identification and Reduction
Software Product Line Engineering has attracted attention in the last two
decades due to its promising capabilities to reduce costs and time to market
through reuse of requirements and components. In practice, developing system
level product lines in a large-scale company is not an easy task as there may
be thousands of variants and multiple disciplines involved. The manual reuse of
legacy system models at domain engineering to build reusable system libraries
and configurations of variants to derive target products can be infeasible. To
tackle this challenge, a Product Line Systems Engineering process is proposed.
Specifically, the process extends research in the System Orthogonal Variability
Model to support hierarchical variability modeling with formal definitions;
utilizes Systems Engineering concepts and legacy system models to build the
hierarchy for the variability model and to identify essential relations between
variants; and finally, analyzes the identified relations to reduce the number
of variation points. The process, which is automated by computational
algorithms, is demonstrated through an illustrative example on generalized
Rolls-Royce aircraft engine control systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of
the process in the reduction of variation points, it is further applied to case
studies in different engineering domains at different levels of complexity.
Subject to system model availability, reduction of 14% to 40% in the number of
variation points are demonstrated in the case studies.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables; submitted to the IEEE Systems Journal
on 3rd June 201
Merging cloned alloy models with colorful refactorings
Likewise to code, clone-and-own is a common way to create variants of a model, to explore the impact of different features while exploring the design of a software system. Previously, we have introduced Colorful Alloy, an extension of the popular Alloy language and toolkit to support feature-oriented design, where model elements can be annotated with feature expressions and further highlighted with different colors to ease understanding. In this paper we propose a catalog of refactorings for Colorful Alloy models, and show how they can be used to iteratively merge cloned Alloy models into a single feature-annotated colorful model, where the commonalities and differences between the different clones are easily perceived, and more efficient aggregated analyses can be performed.This work is financed by the ERDF — European Regional Development Fund
through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation
– COMPETE 2020 Programme and by National Funds through the Portuguese
funding agency, FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project
PTDC/CCI-INF/29583/2017 – POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029583
Merging cloned Alloy models with colorful refactorings
Likewise to code, clone-and-own is a common way to create variants of a model, to explore the impact of different features while exploring the design of a software system. Previously, we have introduced Colorful Alloy, an extension of the popular Alloy language and toolkit to support feature-oriented design, where model elements can be annotated with feature expressions and further highlighted with different colors to ease understanding. In this paper we propose a catalog of refactoring laws for Colorful Alloy models, and show how they can be used to iteratively merge cloned Alloy models into a single feature-annotated colorful model, where the commonalities and differences between the different clones are easily perceived, and more efficient aggregated analyses can be performed. We then show how these refactorings can be composed in an automated merging strategy that can be used to migrate Alloy clones into a Colorful Alloy SPL in a single step. The paper extends a conference version [1] by formalizing the semantics and type system of the improved Colorful Alloy language, allowing the simplification of some rules and the evaluation of their soundness. Additional rules were added to the catalog, and the evaluation extended. The automated merging strategy is also novel.This work is financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation – COMPETE 2020 Programme and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project PTDC/CCI-INF/29583/2017 – POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029583
Feature location benchmark for extractive software product line adoption research using realistic and synthetic Eclipse variants
International audienceContext: It is common belief that high impact research in software reuse requires assessment in non-trivial, comparable, and reproducible settings. However, software artefacts and common representations are usually unavailable. Also, establishing a representative ground truth is a challenging and debatable subject. Feature location in the context of software families, which is key for software product line adoption, is a research field that is becoming more mature with a high proliferation of techniques.Objective: We present EFLBench, a benchmark and a framework to provide a common ground for the evaluation of feature location techniques in families of systems.Method: EFLBench leverages the efforts made by the Eclipse Community which provides feature-based family artefacts and their plugin-based implementations. Eclipse is an active and non-trivial project and thus, it establishes an unbiased ground truth which is realistic and challenging.Results: EFLBench is publicly available and supports all tasks for feature location techniques integration, benchmark construction and benchmark usage. We demonstrate its usage, simplicity and reproducibility by comparing four techniques in Eclipse releases. As an extension of our previously published work, we consider a decade of Eclipse releases and we also contribute an approach to automatically generate synthetic Eclipse variants to benchmark feature location techniques in tailored settings. We present and discuss three strategies for this automatic generation and we present the results using different settings.Conclusion: EFLBench is a contribution to foster the research in feature location in families of systems providing a common framework and a set of baseline techniques and results
Implementing Product Line Architecture with Code Generation and Separation
Title from PDF of title page, viewed May 26, 2017Thesis advisor: Yongjie ZhengVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 45-49)Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2016Software product line engineering (SPLE) emphasizes high level of reuse and mass
customization of the core assets shared by a family of software products. Product line
architecture (PLA) is a promising application of architecture-centric development in SPLE.
However, unfaithful implementation of the PLA and manual implementation of its
variation points remain two difficult challenges that need to be addressed in this area. While
many PLA implementation approaches exist, they either focus on certain types of
variability or require manual implementation of variation points.
In this thesis, I present a novel code generation and separation approach that can
faithfully implement the PLA with a goal of reducing the inconsistency between the PLA
and its implementation. Moreover, the approach can automatically implement the variation
points modeled in the PLA and convert them to code entities using different techniques
based on the variation point’s type.
I have implemented the approach in ArchFeature, an Eclipse-based PLA
development environment, and evaluated it in a case study with a chat application. The
purpose of the evaluation was to validate the approach and to assess its feasibility,
performance, and affordability.Introduction -- Background and related work -- Approach -- Implementation -- Evaluation -- Conclusion and future wor