A component-based product line architecture for workflow management systems

This paper presents a component-based product line for workflow management systems. The process followed to design the product line was based on the Catalysis method. Extensions were made to represent variability across the process. The domain of workflow management systems has been shown to be appropriate to the application of the product line approach as there are a standard architecture and models established by a regulatory board, the Workflow Management Coalition. In addition, there is a demand for similar workflow management systems but with some different features. The product line architecture was evaluated with Rapide simulation tools. The evaluation was based on selected scenarios, thus, avoiding implementation issues. The strategy that has been used to populate the architecture and experiment with the product line is shown. In particular, the design of the workflow execution manager component is described

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

Evaluation of Variability Concepts for Simulink in the Automotive Domain

Modeling variability in Matlab/Simulink becomes more and more important. We took the two variability modeling concepts already included in Matlab/Simulink and our own one and evaluated them to find out which one is suited best for modeling variability in the automotive domain. We conducted a controlled experiment with developers at Volkswagen AG to decide which concept is preferred by developers and if their preference aligns with measurable performance factors. We found out that all existing concepts are viable approaches and that the delta approach is both the preferred concept as well as the objectively most efficient one, which makes Delta-Simulink a good solution to model variability in the automotive domain.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, Proceedings of 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), pp. 5373-5382, Kauai, Hawaii, USA, IEEE Computer Society, 201

Incremental Consistency Checking in Delta-oriented UML-Models for Automation Systems

Automation systems exist in many variants and may evolve over time in order to deal with different environment contexts or to fulfill changing customer requirements. This induces an increased complexity during design-time as well as tedious maintenance efforts. We already proposed a multi-perspective modeling approach to improve the development of such systems. It operates on different levels of abstraction by using well-known UML-models with activity, composite structure and state chart models. Each perspective was enriched with delta modeling to manage variability and evolution. As an extension, we now focus on the development of an efficient consistency checking method at several levels to ensure valid variants of the automation system. Consistency checking must be provided for each perspective in isolation, in-between the perspectives as well as after the application of a delta.Comment: In Proceedings FMSPLE 2016, arXiv:1603.0857

Quality-aware model-driven service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box character of services

Colored model based testing for software product lines (CMBT-SWPL)

Over the last decade, the software product line domain has emerged as one of the mostpromising software development paradigms. The main benefits of a software product lineapproach are improvements in productivity, time to market, product quality, and customersatisfaction.Therefore, one topic that needs greater emphasis is testing of software product lines toachieve the required software quality assurance. Our concern is how to test a softwareproduct line as early as possible in order to detect errors, because the cost of error detectedIn early phases is much less compared to the cost of errors when detected later.The method suggested in this thesis is a model-based, reuse-oriented test technique calledColored Model Based Testing for Software Product Lines (CMBT-SWPL). CMBT-SWPLis a requirements-based approach for efficiently generating tests for products in a soft-ware product line. This testing approach is used for validation and verification of productlines. It is a novel approach to test product lines using a Colored State Chart (CSC), whichconsiders variability early in the product line development process. More precisely, the vari-ability will be introduced in the main components of the CSC. Accordingly, the variabilityis preserved in test cases, as they are generated from colored test models automatically.During domain engineering, the CSC is derived from the feature model. By coloring theState Chart, the behavior of several product line variants can be modeled simultaneouslyin a single diagram and thus address product line variability early. The CSC representsthe test model, from which test cases using statistical testing are derived.During application engineering, these colored test models are customized for a specificapplication of the product line. At the end of this test process, the test cases are generatedagain using statistical testing, executed and the test results are ready for evaluation. Inxaddition, the CSC will be transformed to a Colored Petri Net (CPN) for verification andsimulation purposes.The main gains of applying the CMBT-SWPL method are early detection of defects inrequirements, such as ambiguities incompleteness and redundancy which is then reflectedin saving the test effort, time, development and maintenance costs

A Comparative Study on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines

[EN] Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) and Software Product Lines (SPL) are two software development paradigms that emphasize reusing. The former reuse domain knowledge is represented as models and model transformations for product development, and the latter reuse domain knowledge is represented as core assets to produce a family of products in a given domain. The adequate combination of both paradigms can bring together important advantages to the software development community. However, how to manage requirements during a model-driven product line development remains an open challenge. In particular, the Requirements Engineering (RE) activity must deal with specific properties such as variability and commonality for a whole family of products. This paper presents a comparative study of eleven approaches that perform a MDE strategy in the RE activity for SPL, with the aim of identify ing current practices and research gaps. In summary, most of the approaches are focused on the Domain Engineering phase of the SPL development, giving less attention to the Application Engineering phase. Moreover there is a lack of coverage of the Scoping activity, which defines the SPL boundaries. Several approaches apply some model transformations to obtain architectural and application requirements artifacts. Regarding the tool support for requirements specification and management, we found that most of the approaches use only academic prototypes. Regarding the validation of the approaches, the use of Case Studies as a proof of concept was the most commonly used method; however, there is a lack of well-defined case studies and empirical studies to improve the proposals.This research is part of the MULTIPLE project (with ref. TIN2009-13838).Blanes Domínguez, D.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2012). A Comparative Study on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines. Revista de Sistemas e Computação. 2(1):3-13. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/43841S3132