6,218 research outputs found
Boundary Objects and their Use in Agile Systems Engineering
Agile methods are increasingly introduced in automotive companies in the
attempt to become more efficient and flexible in the system development. The
adoption of agile practices influences communication between stakeholders, but
also makes companies rethink the management of artifacts and documentation like
requirements, safety compliance documents, and architecture models.
Practitioners aim to reduce irrelevant documentation, but face a lack of
guidance to determine what artifacts are needed and how they should be managed.
This paper presents artifacts, challenges, guidelines, and practices for the
continuous management of systems engineering artifacts in automotive based on a
theoretical and empirical understanding of the topic. In collaboration with 53
practitioners from six automotive companies, we conducted a design-science
study involving interviews, a questionnaire, focus groups, and practical data
analysis of a systems engineering tool. The guidelines suggest the distinction
between artifacts that are shared among different actors in a company (boundary
objects) and those that are used within a team (locally relevant artifacts). We
propose an analysis approach to identify boundary objects and three practices
to manage systems engineering artifacts in industry
An industrial case study for adopting software product lines in automotive industry an evolution-based approach for software product lines (EVOA-SPL)
Software Product Lines (SPLs) seek to achieve gains in productivity and time to market. Many companies in several domains are constantly adopting SPLs. Dealing with SPLs begin after companies find themselves with successful variants of a product in a particular domain. The adoption of an SPL-based approach in the automotive industry may provide a significant return on investment. To switch to an SPL-based approach, practitioners lack a reengineering approach that supports SPL migration and evolution in a systematic fashion.
This paper presents a practical evolution-based approach to migrate and evolve a set of variants of a given product into an SPL and describes a case study from the automotive domain. The case study considers the need to handle the classical sensor variants family (CSVF) at Bosch Company. Using this study, we performed a contributed step toward future switch of the CSVF into the SPL. We investigated the applicability of the proposed evolution-based approach with a real variants family (using the textual requirements of the CSVF) and we evaluated our approach using several data collection methods. The results reveal that our approach can be suitable for the
automotive domain in the case study.The University of Minho and Bosch Company supported this research. We thank our colleagues from the classical sensor development team at Bosch Company. Especially Andre L. Ferreira and Jana Seidel for their active collaboration and support. Special acknowledgment to the spirit of Helder Boas, who passed away after he offered the help and support to this research work
Managed Evolution of Automotive Software Product Line Architectures: A Systematic Literature Study
The rapidly growing number of software-based features in the automotive domain as well as the special requirements in this domain ask for dedicated engineering approaches, models, and processes. Nowadays, software development in the automotive sector is generally developed as product line development, in which major parts of the software are kept adaptable in order to enable reusability of the software in different vehicle variants. In addition, reuse also plays an important role in the development of new vehicle generations in order to reduce development costs. Today, a high number of methods and techniques exist to support the product line driven development of software in the automotive sector. However, these approaches generally consider only partial aspects of development. In this paper, we present an in-depth literature study based on a conceptual model of artifacts and activities for the managed evolution of automotive software product line architectures. We are interested in the coverage of the particular aspects of the conceptual model and, thus, the fields covered in current research and research gaps, respectively. Furthermore, we aim to identify the methods and techniques used to implement automotive software product lines in general, and their usage scope in particular. As a result, this in-depth review reveals that none of the studies represent a holistic approach for the managed evolution of automotive software product lines. In addition, approaches from agile software development are of growing interest in this field
Clafer: Lightweight Modeling of Structure, Behaviour, and Variability
Embedded software is growing fast in size and complexity, leading to intimate
mixture of complex architectures and complex control. Consequently, software
specification requires modeling both structures and behaviour of systems.
Unfortunately, existing languages do not integrate these aspects well, usually
prioritizing one of them. It is common to develop a separate language for each
of these facets. In this paper, we contribute Clafer: a small language that
attempts to tackle this challenge. It combines rich structural modeling with
state of the art behavioural formalisms. We are not aware of any other modeling
language that seamlessly combines these facets common to system and software
modeling. We show how Clafer, in a single unified syntax and semantics, allows
capturing feature models (variability), component models, discrete control
models (automata) and variability encompassing all these aspects. The language
is built on top of first order logic with quantifiers over basic entities (for
modeling structures) combined with linear temporal logic (for modeling
behaviour). On top of this semantic foundation we build a simple but expressive
syntax, enriched with carefully selected syntactic expansions that cover
hierarchical modeling, associations, automata, scenarios, and Dwyer's property
patterns. We evaluate Clafer using a power window case study, and comparing it
against other notations that substantially overlap with its scope (SysML, AADL,
Temporal OCL and Live Sequence Charts), discussing benefits and perils of using
a single notation for the purpose
Software Product Line Engineering: Future Research Directions
The recent trend of switching from single software product development tolines of software products in the software industry has made the software product line concept viable and widely accepted methodology in the future. Some of the potential benefits of this approach include cost reduction, improvement in quality and a decrease in product development time. Many organizations that deal in wide areas of operation, from consumer electronics, telecommunications, and avionics to information technology, are using software product lines practice because it deals with effective utilization ofsoftware assets and provides numerous benefits. Software product line engineering is an inter-disciplinary concept. It spans over the dimensions of business, architecture, process and organization. The business dimension of software product lines deals with managing a strong coordination between product line engineering and the business aspects of product line. Software product line architecture is regarded as one of the crucial piece of entity in software product lines. All the resulting products share thiscommon architecture. The organizational theories, behavior and management play critical role in the process of institutionalization of software product line engineering in an organization. The objective of this chapter is to discuss the state of the art of software product line engineering from the perspectives of business, architecture, organizational management and software engineering process. This work also highlights and discusses the future research directions in this area thus providing an opportunity to researchers and practitioners to better understand the future trends and requirements
Integration of Quality Attributes in Software Product Line Development
Different
approaches
for
building
modern
software
systems
in
complex
and
open
environments
have
been
proposed
in
the
last
few
years.
Some
efforts
try
to
apply
Software
Product
Line
(SPL)
approach
to
take
advantage
of
the
massive
reuse
for
producing
software
systems
that
share
a
common
set
of
features.
In
general
quality
assurance
is
a
crucial
activity
for
success
in
software
industry,
but
it
is
even
more
important
when
talking
about
Software
Product
Lines
since
the
intensive
reuse
of
assets
makes
the
quality
attributes
(a
measurable
physical
or
abstract
property
of
an
entity)
of
the
assets
to
be
transmitted
to
the
whole
SPL
scope.
However,
despite
the
importance
that
quality
has
in
software
product
line
development,
most
of
the
methodologies
being
applied
in
Software
Product
Line
Development
focus
only
on
managing
the
commonalities
and
variability
within
the
product
line
and
not
giving
support
to
the
non--¿
functional
requirements
that
the
products
must
fit.
The
main
goal
of
this
master
final
work
is
to introduce
quality
attributes
in
early
stages
of
software
product
line
development
processes
by
means
of
the
definition
of
a
production
plan
that,
on
one
hand,
integrates
quality
as
an
additional
view
for
describing
the
extension
of
the
software
product
line
and,
on
the
other
hand
introduces
the
quality
attributes
as
a
decision
factor
during
product
configuration
and
when
selecting
among
design
alternatives.
Our
approach
has
been
defined
following
the
Model--¿
Driven
Software
Development
paradigm.
Therefore
all
the
software
artifacts
defined
had
its
correspondent
metamodels
and
the
processes
defined
rely
on
automated
model
transformations.
Finally
in
order
to
illustrate
the
feasibility
of
the
approach
we
have
integrated
the
quality
view
in
an
SPL
example
in
the
context
of
safety
critical
embedded
systems
on
the
automotive
domain.González Huerta, J. (2011). Integration of Quality Attributes in Software Product Line Development. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/15835Archivo delegad
Recommendation Heuristics for Improving Product Line Configuration Processes
In mass customization industries, such as car manufacturing, configurators play an important role both to interact with customers and in engineering processes. This is particularly true when engineers rely on reuse of assets and product line engineering techniques. Theoretically, product line configuration should be guided by the product line model. However, in the industrial context, the configuration of products from product line models is complex and error prone due to the large number of variables in the models. The configuration activity quickly becomes cumbersome due to the number of decisions needed to get a proper configuration, to the fact that they should be taken in pre-defined order, or the poor response time of configurators when decisions are not appropriate. This chapter presents a collection of recommendation heuristics to improve the interactivity of product line configuration so as to make it scalable to common engineering situations.We describe the principles, benefits and the implementation of each heuristic using constraint programming. The application and usability of the heuristics is demonstrated using a case study from the car industry
08331 Abstracts Collection -- Perspectives Workshop: Model Engineering of Complex Systems (MECS)
From 10.08. to 13.08.2008, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08331 ``Perspectives Workshop: Model Engineering of Complex Systems (MECS)\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl.
During the seminar, several participants presented their current
research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of
the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of
seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section
describes the seminar topics and goals in general.
Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available
Correct Configuration of Process Variants in Provop
When engineering process-aware information systems (PAISs) one of the fundamental challenges is to cope with the variability of business processes. While some progress has been achieved regarding the configuration of process variants, there exists only little work on how to accomplish this in a correct manner. Configuring process variants constitutes a non-trivial challenge when considering the large number of process variants that exist in practice as well as the many syntactical and semantical constraints a configured process variant has to obey in a given context. In previous work we introduced the Provop approach for configuring and managing process variants. This paper picks up the Provop framework and shows how it ensures correctness of configurable process variants by construction. We discuss advanced concepts for the context- and constraint-based configuration of process variants, and show how they can be utilized to ensure correctness of the configured process variants. In this paper we also consider correctness issues in conjunction with dynamic variant re-configurations. Enhancing PAISs with the capability to correctly configure process models fitting to the given application context, and to correctly manage the resulting process variants afterwards, will enable a new quality in PAIS engineering
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