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

Domain-specific languages

Domain-Specific Languages are used in software engineering in order to enhance quality, flexibility, and timely delivery of software systems, by taking advantage of specific properties of a particular application domain. This survey covers terminology, risks and benefits, examples, design methodologies, and implementation techniques of domain-specific languages as used for the construction and maintenance of software systems. Moreover, it covers an annotated selection of 75 key publications in the area of domain-specific languages

An Architecture Maturity Model of Software Product Line

Software architecture has been a key research area in the software engineering community due to its significant role in creating high-quality software. The trend of developing product lines rather than single products has made the software product line a viable option in the industry. Software product line architecture (SPLA) is regarded as one of the crucial components in the product lines, since all of the resulting products share this common architecture. The increased popularity of software product lines demands a process maturity evaluation methodology. Consequently,this paper presents an architecture process maturity model for software product line engineering to evaluate the current maturity of the product line architecture development process in an organization. Assessment questionnaires and a rating methodology comprise the framework of this model. The objective of the questionnaires is to collect information about the SPLA development process. Thus, in general this work contributes towards the establishment of a comprehensive and unified strategy for the process maturity evaluation of software product line engineering. Furthermore, we conducted two case studies and reported the assessment results, which show the maturity of the architecture development process in two organizations

An Organizational Maturity Model of Software Product Line Engineering

Software product line engineering is an inter-disciplinary concept. It spans the dimensions of business, architecture, process, and the organization. Some of the potential benefits of this approach include cost reduction, improvements in product quality and a decrease in product development time. The increasing popularity of software product line engineering in the software industry necessitates a process maturity evaluation methodology. Accordingly, this paper presents an organizational maturity model of software product line engineering for evaluating the maturity of organizational dimension. The model assumes that organizational theories, behavior, and management play a critical role in the institutionalization of software product line engineering within an organization. Assessment questionnaires and a rating methodology comprise the framework of this model. The objective and design of the questionnaires are to collect information about the software product line engineering process from the dual perspectives of organizational behavior and management. Furthermore, we conducted two case studies and reported the assessment results using the organizational maturity model presented in this paper

The Software Factory: Integrating CASE Technologies to Improve Productivity

This report addresses the use of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) technology for the development of aircraft software.Lean Aerospace Initiativ

Building software factories in the aerospace industry

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-110).by Jose K. Menendez.M.S

Probabilistic Graphical Modelling for Software Product Lines: A Frameweork for Modeling and Reasoning under Uncertainty

This work provides a holistic investigation into the realm of feature modeling within software product lines. The work presented identifies limitations and challenges within the current feature modeling approaches. Those limitations include, but not limited to, the dearth of satisfactory cognitive presentation, inconveniency in scalable systems, inflexibility in adapting changes, nonexistence of predictability of models behavior, as well as the lack of probabilistic quantification of model’s implications and decision support for reasoning under uncertainty. The work in this thesis addresses these challenges by proposing a series of solutions. The first solution is the construction of a Bayesian Belief Feature Model, which is a novel modeling approach capable of quantifying the uncertainty measures in model parameters by a means of incorporating probabilistic modeling with a conventional modeling approach. The Bayesian Belief feature model presents a new enhanced feature modeling approach in terms of truth quantification and visual expressiveness. The second solution takes into consideration the unclear support for the reasoning under the uncertainty process, and the challenging constraint satisfaction problem in software product lines. This has been done through the development of a mathematical reasoner, which was designed to satisfy the model constraints by considering probability weight for all involved parameters and quantify the actual implications of the problem constraints. The developed Uncertain Constraint Satisfaction Problem approach has been tested and validated through a set of designated experiments. Profoundly stating, the main contributions of this thesis include the following: • Develop a framework for probabilistic graphical modeling to build the purported Bayesian belief feature model. • Extend the model to enhance visual expressiveness throughout the integration of colour degree variation; in which the colour varies with respect to the predefined probabilistic weights. • Enhance the constraints satisfaction problem by the uncertainty measuring of the parameters truth assumption. • Validate the developed approach against different experimental settings to determine its functionality and performance

Estrategias de pruebas de líneas de producto de sistemas de tiempo real especificados con diagramas de estados jerárquicos

Las Líneas de Producto Software han aparecido en la ingeniería del software como una técnica cuyo objetivo es el de poder crear diferentes variantes software a partir de una infraestructura común, del mismo modo que se hace en otros sectores industriales. Un aspecto que hasta ahora no se ha investigado con tanta extensión es el de las Pruebas de Línea de Producto Software. La cuestión fundamental es decidir hasta qué punto es posible probar las diferents variantes de forma común. En el caso más optimista, probando una funcionalidad sobre la parte general se podría dar por probada sobre todas las variantes. Por contra, en el caso más pesimista, las pruebas de una Línea de Producto Software serían exactamente iguales que las pruebas de varios productos independientes que se hicieran de forma separada. Como término medio, aunque se pruebe la misma funcionalidad en todas las variantes, se podrian reutilizar por ejemplo la arquitectura de pruebas, los casos de prueba, el entorno de pruebas, etc. Buscando dar una solución al problema de las pruebas de Líneas de producto Software de tiempo real, la Tesis Doctoral propone un método de pruebas basado en los diagramas de estados jerárquicos del lenguaje UML para definir los casos de prueba. Se propone una técnica para asegurar la correspondencia (trazabilidad) de los requisitos con los casos de prueba, estructurándolos de forma semejante a los requisitos y estudiando cómo las variantes de los requisitos impactan sobre los diferentes elementos de prueba. También se define dentro del método un flujo de actividades, cuyo objetivo es la automatización de las pruebas para así poder probar las diferentes variantes de la Línea de Producto Software de forma eficiente. Este método tiene tres fases: el Diseño de Pruebas, donde se agrupan en clases de prueba los requisitos tanto genéricos como específicos de cada variante, y se modela cada clase de prueba mediante diagramas de estados jerárquicos y, si es preciso, escenarios en los cuales se incluyen de forma explícita sus requisitos asociados. En la fase de Implementación de Pruebas, estos diagramas se describen por medio de tablas de estados y eventos, con la información adicional necesaria (los datos de prueba) para generar automáticamente el código con los casos de prueba ejecutables. En la fase final de Ejecución de Pruebas, se realiza el caso de prueba sobre el sistema real y se registra el resultado obtenido. Como aportación final, se propone un metamodelo donde se muestran todos los elementos del método de pruebas y las relaciones que existen entre ellos. Para comprobar que la solución propuesta al problema de las pruebas de Líneas de Producto Software de Tiempo real es satisfactoria, se ha elegido una doble estrategia consistente en la aplicación del método sobre un caso industrial real y en la elaboración de un conjunto de herramientas software prototipo, con las cuales se ha demostrado la validez del método propuesto y se ha delimitado su alcance. El caso industrial real escogido ha sido el de una Línea de Productos Software Tiempo Real de sistemas de control del tráfico ferroviario, en el que el autor desarrolla desde hace diez años su actividad profesional, lo cual da a esta Tesis Doctoral un marcado carácter industrial, tanto por la relevancia práctica del tema elegido como por reflejar una experiencia de aplicación industrial real. Las herramientas software desarrolladas, tanto en el caso de aplicación industrial real, como en el ámbito de la Tesis Doctoral, sirven de soporte a la generación de casos de prueba a partir de los modelos de diagramas de estados, la ejecución automatizada de las pruebas, el análisis de los resultados o veredictos de las pruebas y la medición de cobertura de requisitos alcanzada en las pruebas