RED-PL, a Method for Deriving Product Requirements from a Product Line Requirements Model

International audienceSoftware product lines (SPL) modeling has proven to be an effective approach to reuse in software development. Several variability approaches were developed to plan requirements reuse, but only little of them actually address the issue of deriving product requirements. Indeed, while the modeling approaches sell on requirements reuse, the associated derivation techniques actually focus on deriving and reusing technical product data.This paper presents a method that intends to support requirements derivation.Its underlying principle is to take advantage of approaches made for reuse PL requirements and to complete them by a requirements development process by reuse for single products. The proposed approach matches users' product requirements with PL requirements models and derives a collection ofrequirements that is (i) consistent, and (ii) optimal with respect to users' priorities and company's constraints. The proposed methodological process was validated in an industrial setting by considering the requirement engineering phase of a product line of blood analyzers

Solving Integer Constraint in Reuse Based Requirements Engineering

International audienceProduct Lines (PL) have proved an effective approach to reuse-based systems development. Several modelling languages were proposed so far to specify PL. Although they can be very different, these languages show two common features: they emphasize (a) variability, and (b) the specification of constraints to define acceptable configurations. It is now widely acknowledged that configuring a product can be considered as a constraint satisfaction problem. It is thus natural to consider constraint programming as a first choice candidate to specify constraints on PL. For instance, the different constraints that can be specified using the FODA language can easily be expressed using boolean constraints, which enables automated calculation and configuration using a SAT solver. But constraint programming proposes other domains than the boolean domain: for instance integers, real, or sets. The integer domain was, for instance, proposed by Benavides to specify constraints on feature attributes. This paper proposes to further explore the use of integer constraint programming to specify PL constraints. The approach was implemented in a prototype tool. Its use in a real case showed that constraint programming encompasses different PL modeling languages (such as FORE, OVM, or else), and allows to specify complex constraints that are difficult to specify with these languages

Using Integer Constraint Solving in Reuse Based Requirements Engineering

Product Lines (PL) have proved an effective approach to reuse-based systems development. Several modeling languages were proposed so far to specify PL. Although they can be very different, these languages show two common features: they emphasize (a) variability, and (b) the specification of constraints to define acceptable configurations. It is now widely acknowledged that configuring a product can be considered as a constraint satisfaction problem. It is thus natural to consider constraint programming as a first choice candidate to specify constraints on PL. For instance, the different constraints that can be specified using the FODA language can easily be expressed using boolean constraints, which enables automated calculation and configuration using a SAT solver. But constraint programming proposes other domains than the boolean domain: for instance integers, real, or sets. The integer domain was, for instance, proposed by Benavides to specify constraints on feature attributes. This paper proposes to further explore the use of integer constraint programming to specify PL constraints. The approach was implemented in a prototype tool. Its use in a real case showed that constraint programming encompasses different PL modeling languages (such as FORE, OVM, or else), and allows specifying complex constraints that are difficult to specify with these languages

Deriving Product Line Requirements: the RED-PL Guidance Approach

Product lines (PL) modeling have proven to be an effective approach to reuse in software development.Several variability approaches were developed to plan requirements reuse, but only little of them actuallyaddress the issue of deriving product requirements.This paper presents a method, RED-PL that intends to support requirements derivation. The originality ofthe proposed approach is that (i) it is user-oriented, (ii) it guides product requirements elicitation andderivation as a decision making activity, and (iii) it provides systematic and interactive guidance assistinganalysts in taking decisions about requirements. The RED-PL methodological process was validatedin an industrial setting by considering the requirement engineering phase of a product line of blood analyzers

Conformance Checking with Constraint Logic Programming: The Case of Feature Models

Developing high quality systems depends on developing high quality models. An important facet of model quality is their consistency with respect to their meta-model. We call the verification of this quality the conformance checking process. We are interested in the conformance checking of Product Line Models (PLMs). The problem in the context of product lines is that product models are not created by instantiating a meta-model: they are derived from PLMs. Therefore it is usually at the level of PLMs that conformance checking is applied. On the semantic level, a PLM is defined as the collection of all the product models that can be derived from it. Therefore checking the conformance of the PLM is equivalent to checking the conformance of all the product models. However, we would like to avoid this naïve approach because it is not scalable due to the high number of models. In fact, it is even sometimes infeasible to calculate the number of product models of a PLM. Despite the importance of PLM conformance checking, very few research works have been published and tools do not adequately support it. In this paper, we present an approach that employs Constraint Logic Programming as a technology on which to build a PLM conformance checking solution. The paper demonstrates the approach with feature models, the de facto standard for modeling software product lines. Based on an extensive literature review and an empirical study, we identified a set of 9 conformance checking rules and implemented them on the GNU Prolog constraints solver. We evaluated our approach by applying our rules to 50 feature models of sizes up to 10000 features. The evaluation showed that our approach is effective and scalable to industry size models

Defects in Product Line Models and How to Identify Them

This chapter is about generic (language-independent) verification criteria of product line models, its identification, formalisation, categorization, implementation with constraint programming techniques and its evaluation on several industrial and academic product line models represented with several languages

Constraints: the Heart of Domain and Application Engineering in the Product Lines Engineering Strategy

International audienceDrawing from an analogy between features based Product Line (PL) models and Constraint Programming (CP), this paper explores the use of CP in the Domain Engineering and Application Engineering activities that are put in motion in a Product Line Engineering strategy. The start idea is simple: both CP and PL engineering deal with variables, and constraints that these variables must satisfy. Therefore, specifying a PL as a constraint program instead of a feature model, or another kind of PL formalism, carries out two important qualities of CP: expressiveness and direct automation. On the one hand, variables in CP can take values over boolean, integer, real or even complex domains (i.e., lists, arrays and trees) and not only boolean values as in most PL languages such as the Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA). Specifying boolean, arithmetic, symbolic and reified constraint, provides a power of expression that spans beyond that provided by the boolean dependencies in FODA models. On the other hand, PL models expressed as constraint programs can directly be executed and analyzed by off-the-shelf solvers. Starting with a working example, this paper explores the issues of (a) how to specify a PL model using CP, including in the presence of multi-model representation, (b) how to verify PL specifications, (c) how to specify configuration requirements and (d) how to support the product configuration activity. Tests performed on a benchmark of 50 PL models show that the approach is efficient and scales up easily to very large and complex PL specification

Software Product Line

The Software Product Line (SPL) is an emerging methodology for developing software products. Currently, there are two hot issues in the SPL: modelling and the analysis of the SPL. Variability modelling techniques have been developed to assist engineers in dealing with the complications of variability management. The principal goal of modelling variability techniques is to configure a successful software product by managing variability in domain-engineering. In other words, a good method for modelling variability is a prerequisite for a successful SPL. On the other hand, analysis of the SPL aids the extraction of useful information from the SPL and provides a control and planning strategy mechanism for engineers or experts. In addition, the analysis of the SPL provides a clear view for users. Moreover, it ensures the accuracy of the SPL. This book presents new techniques for modelling and new methods for SPL analysis