Variability Management in Software Product Lines Online Learning Applications

The process of learning and teaching online learning has undergone many changes in line with technological developments. Education institutions have begun introducing new methods of learning this. However, it needs a huge amount of labor intensive to produce and maintain educational technologies due to its huge size (literacy, vocational education, school education, engineering and medical education) and huge variants (language, dialect). With the growing demand and at the same time would like to reduce the factor of cost, time and effort is long, then the need for an effective solution allowing rapid system development. A Software Product Line (SPL) approach is one of the best methods that can be used to develop an educational software family. This research focuses on core asset by recognizing and representing variability in variability management. The study employed two phases of activities in data gathering, there are filtering out data from secondary sources which detail out the features of e-learning and constructivist learning environment of each Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Second phase involved the use of expert interviews to determine the features of each higher institution elearning and identify Primitive Requirement of Malaysian Higher Education online learning. Commonality and Variability Analysis (CV Analysis) method has been used as identification of commonality and variability. This analysis is to develop a feature model which further helps in visual representation variants requirements and enhance reusability in the context of product line approaches. As a result, there are 20 Primitive Requirements (PR) has been identified and clearly divided into two categories, common and optional. The frequency in each application of online learning is used to determine whether the PR is reusable. The identification and representation will increase the potential for reuse and help in publishing the specific requirements of the application in the development of the product line

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

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 Process Framework for Semantics-aware Tourism Information Systems

The growing sophistication of user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the Semantic Web and mobile computing has imposed new possibilities for improved intelligence in Tourism Information Systems (TIS). Traditional software engineering and web engineering approaches cannot suffice, hence the need to find new product development approaches that would sufficiently enable the next generation of TIS. The next generation of TIS are expected among other things to: enable semantics-based information processing, exhibit natural language capabilities, facilitate inter-organization exchange of information in a seamless way, and evolve proactively in tandem with dynamic user requirements. In this paper, a product development approach called Product Line for Ontology-based Semantics-Aware Tourism Information Systems (PLOSATIS) which is a novel hybridization of software product line engineering, and Semantic Web engineering concepts is proposed. PLOSATIS is presented as potentially effective, predictable and amenable to software process improvement initiatives

Using problem descriptions to represent variabilities for context-aware applications

This paper investigates the potential use of problem descriptions to represent and analyse variability in context-aware software products. By context-aware, we refer to recognition of changes in properties of external domains, which are recognised as affecting the behaviour of products. There are many reasons for changes in the operating environment, from fluctuating resources upon which the product relies, to different operating locations or the presence of objects. There is an increasing expectation for software intensivedevices to be context-aware which, in turn, adds further variability to problem description and analysis. However, we argue in this paper that the capture of contextual variability on current variability representations and analyses has yet to be explored. We illustrate the representation of this type of variability in a pilot study, and conclude with lessons learnt and an agenda for further work

Crosscutting, what is and what is not? A Formal definition based on a Crosscutting Pattern

Crosscutting is usually described in terms of scattering and tangling. However, the distinction between these concepts is vague, which could lead to ambiguous statements. Sometimes, precise definitions are required, e.g. for the formal identification of crosscutting concerns. We propose a conceptual framework for formalizing these concepts based on a crosscutting pattern that shows the mapping between elements at two levels, e.g. concerns and representations of concerns. The definitions of the concepts are formalized in terms of linear algebra, and visualized with matrices and matrix operations. In this way, crosscutting can be clearly distinguished from scattering and tangling. Using linear algebra, we demonstrate that our definition generalizes other definitions of crosscutting as described by Masuhara & Kiczales [21] and Tonella and Ceccato [28]. The framework can be applied across several refinement levels assuring traceability of crosscutting concerns. Usability of the framework is illustrated by means of applying it to several areas such as change impact analysis, identification of crosscutting at early phases of software development and in the area of model driven software development

Analysis of Software Binaries for Reengineering-Driven Product Line Architecture\^aAn Industrial Case Study

This paper describes a method for the recovering of software architectures from a set of similar (but unrelated) software products in binary form. One intention is to drive refactoring into software product lines and combine architecture recovery with run time binary analysis and existing clustering methods. Using our runtime binary analysis, we create graphs that capture the dependencies between different software parts. These are clustered into smaller component graphs, that group software parts with high interactions into larger entities. The component graphs serve as a basis for further software product line work. In this paper, we concentrate on the analysis part of the method and the graph clustering. We apply the graph clustering method to a real application in the context of automation / robot configuration software tools.Comment: In Proceedings FMSPLE 2015, arXiv:1504.0301

A QFD framework for quality, innovation and high-tech product development dynamics

The customer mostly chooses a product on the base of its quality, which therefore arises as the main cause of its commercial success. In a nearly axiomatic drawing, it follows that the effect of innovation is the improvement of quality, which itself becomes the aim of innovation. Even though the previous statement relates quality and innovation, it still does not explain their dynamics. To stress them, the ‘quality' concept must be analyzed in more detail. In fact, in addition to the ‘perceived quality', the quality ensured through `design, manufacturing and marketing' combined domains should be dealt with. This paper enhances this issue taking advantage of principles and models made available by control theory schemes coupled with quality function development (QFD) and best practice software modeling based on unified modeling language (UML