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

Composition and Self-Adaptation of Service-Based Systems with Feature Models

The adoption of mechanisms for reusing software in pervasive systems has not yet become standard practice. This is because the use of pre-existing software requires the selection, composition and adaptation of prefabricated software parts, as well as the management of some complex problems such as guaranteeing high levels of efficiency and safety in critical domains. In addition to the wide variety of services, pervasive systems are composed of many networked heterogeneous devices with embedded software. In this work, we promote the safe reuse of services in service-based systems using two complementary technologies, Service-Oriented Architecture and Software Product Lines. In order to do this, we extend both the service discovery and composition processes defined in the DAMASCo framework, which currently does not deal with the service variability that constitutes pervasive systems. We use feature models to represent the variability and to self-adapt the services during the composition in a safe way taking context changes into consideration. We illustrate our proposal with a case study related to the driving domain of an Intelligent Transportation System, handling the context information of the environment.Work partially supported by the projects TIN2008-05932, TIN2008-01942, TIN2012-35669, TIN2012-34840 and CSD2007-0004 funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER; P09-TIC-05231 and P11-TIC-7659 funded by Andalusian Government; and FP7-317731 funded by EU. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

The affective extension of ‘Family’ in the context of changing elite business networks

Drawing on 49 oral-history interviews with Scottish family business owner-managers, six key-informant interviews, and secondary sources, this interdisciplinary study analyses the decline of kinship-based connections and the emergence of new kinds of elite networks around the 1980s. As the socioeconomic context changed rapidly during this time, cooperation built primarily around literal family ties could not survive unaltered. Instead of finding unity through bio-legal family connections, elite networks now came to redefine their ‘family businesses’ in terms of affectively loaded ‘family values’ such as loyalty, care, commitment, and even ‘love’. Consciously nurturing ‘as-if-family’ emotional and ethical connections arose as a psychologically effective way to bring together network members who did not necessarily share pre-existing connections of bio-legal kinship. The social-psychological processes involved in this extension of the ‘family’ can be understood using theories of the moral sentiments first developed in the Scottish Enlightenment. These theories suggest that, when the context is amenable, family-like emotional bonds can be extended via sympathy to those to whom one is not literally related. As a result of this ‘progress of sentiments’, one now earns his/her place in a Scottish family business, not by inheriting or marrying into it, but by performing family-like behaviours motivated by shared ethics and affects

Governance and the Processes of Inclusion/Exclusion: A Review of the Theory and Practice.

Governance identifies a discursive domain(Newman, 2002) in which both the policy and academic debate about new institutional configurations emerging from the proliferation of new forms of governing outside and beyond the state, is taking place My concern here is to highlight what I think is an under-theorised dimension in most of the perspectives from which the new forms of governance beyond the state are analysed. Specifically, I embrace Newman’s (2001) suggestion that most of the literature on Governance suffers from an under-theorisation of a “social†dimension of the analysis or, of what she terms the “politics of the wider public realm and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion on which it is based.†Using the above reflection as analytical starting point, this paper aims at showing how an important challenge for the field of Governance studies resides in the attempt to connect administrative and managerial issues with a broader set of issues concerning the nature of political participation in complex societes where not only the borders of the national states are blurred but the character of individual and collective identities is also relational and fluid. We will proceed first by critically reviewing from this perspective some of the current debates taking place in the Governance literature. Secondly by highlighting the concepts I consider fruitful to problematise the social dimension of the state-citizen relationship and to raise important questions with respect to the inclusionary and exclusionary practices on which it is based. And finally I will address the themes of inclusion and composition of consensus amidst diversity and complexity in the light of New Labour’s approach to Governance and, specifically, of its discourses of social inclusion, democratic renewal, networks and partnership governing.

Queerying activism through the lens of the sociology of everyday life

The approaching 30th anniversary of the introduction of the 1988 Local Government Act offers an opportunity to reflect on the nature of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) activism in Britain. The protests against its implementation involved some of the most iconic moments of queer activism. Important though they are, these singular, totemic moments give rise to, and are sustained by small, almost unobtrusive acts which form part of LGB people’s everyday lives. This article aims to contribute to a re-thinking of queer activism where iconic activism is placed in a synergetic relationship with the quieter practices in the quotidian lives of LGB people. The authors interrogate a series of examples, drawn from three studies, to expand ideas about how activism is constituted in everyday life. They discuss the findings in relation to three themes: the need to forge social bonds often forms a prompt to action; disrupting the binary dualism between making history and making a life; and the transformative potential of everyday actions/activism. The lens of the sociology of everyday life (1) encourages a wider constituency of others to engage in politics, and (2) problematises the place of iconic activism.Peer reviewe

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