28,617 research outputs found
Recovering Architectural Variability of a Family of Product Variants
A Software Product Line (SPL) aims at applying a pre-planned systematic reuse
of large-grained software artifacts to increase the software productivity and
reduce the development cost. The idea of SPL is to analyze the business domain
of a family of products to identify the common and the variable parts between
the products. However, it is common for companies to develop, in an ad-hoc
manner (e.g. clone and own), a set of products that share common
functionalities and differ in terms of others. Thus, many recent research
contributions are proposed to re-engineer existing product variants to a SPL.
Nevertheless, these contributions are mostly focused on managing the
variability at the requirement level. Very few contributions address the
variability at the architectural level despite its major importance. Starting
from this observation, we propose, in this paper, an approach to reverse
engineer the architecture of a set of product variants. Our goal is to identify
the variability and dependencies among architectural-element variants at the
architectural level. Our work relies on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to
analyze the variability. To validate the proposed approach, we experimented on
two families of open-source product variants; Mobile Media and Health Watcher.
The results show that our approach is able to identify the architectural
variability and the dependencies
Traceability for Model Driven, Software Product Line Engineering
Traceability is an important challenge for software organizations. This is true for traditional software development and even more so in new approaches that introduce more variety of artefacts such as Model Driven development or Software Product Lines. In this paper we look at some aspect of the interaction of Traceability, Model Driven development and Software 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
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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
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 AndalucĂa Tec
Variability and Evolution in Systems of Systems
In this position paper (1) we discuss two particular aspects of Systems of
Systems, i.e., variability and evolution. (2) We argue that concepts from
Product Line Engineering and Software Evolution are relevant to Systems of
Systems Engineering. (3) Conversely, concepts from Systems of Systems
Engineering can be helpful in Product Line Engineering and Software Evolution.
Hence, we argue that an exchange of concepts between the disciplines would be
beneficial.Comment: In Proceedings AiSoS 2013, arXiv:1311.319
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Towards a Framework of Choices Made During the Lifecycles of Process Models
A variety of process modelling approaches exist. The tools provide visualizations and enable analyses of a process. However, analyses of a process depend fundamentally on the properties of the underlying process model. Choices that modellers make in building process models affect the quality of the created models and have an effect on what the models can be used for and can affect the process that is modelled. This paper reflects over the choices the processes modellers need to make in the course of building processes and proposes a framework to show how the choices are related to each other
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