Model driven product line engineering : core asset and process implications

Reuse is at the heart of major improvements in productivity and quality in Software Engineering. Both Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) are software development paradigms that promote reuse. Specifically, they promote systematic reuse and a departure from craftsmanship towards an industrialization of the software development process. MDE and SPLE have established their benefits separately. Their combination, here called Model Driven Product Line Engineering (MDPLE), gathers together the advantages of both. Nevertheless, this blending requires MDE to be recasted in SPLE terms. This has implications on both the core assets and the software development process. The challenges are twofold: (i) models become central core assets from which products are obtained and (ii) the software development process needs to cater for the changes that SPLE and MDE introduce. This dissertation proposes a solution to the first challenge following a feature oriented approach, with an emphasis on reuse and early detection of inconsistencies. The second part is dedicated to assembly processes, a clear example of the complexity MDPLE introduces in software development processes. This work advocates for a new discipline inside the general software development process, i.e., the Assembly Plan Management, which raises the abstraction level and increases reuse in such processes. Different case studies illustrate the presented ideas.This work was hosted by the University of the Basque Country (Faculty of Computer Sciences). The author enjoyed a doctoral grant from the Basque Goverment under the “Researchers Training Program” during the years 2005 to 2009. The work was was co-supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, and the European Social Fund under contracts WAPO (TIN2005-05610) and MODELINE (TIN2008-06507-C02-01)

Visualizing the customization endeavor in product-based-evolving software product lines: a case of action design research

[EN] Software Product Lines (SPLs) aim at systematically reusing software assets, and deriving products (a.k.a., variants) out of those assets. However, it is not always possible to handle SPL evolution directly through these reusable assets. Time-to-market pressure, expedited bug fixes, or product specifics lead to the evolution to first happen at the product level, and to be later merged back into the SPL platform where the core assets reside. This is referred to as product-based evolution. In this scenario, deciding when and what should go into the next SPL release is far from trivial. Distinct questions arise. How much effort are developers spending on product customization? Which are the most customized core assets? To which extent is the core asset code being reused for a given product? We refer to this endeavor as Customization Analysis, i.e., understanding the functional increments in adjusting products from the last SPL platform release. The scale of the SPLs' code-base calls for customization analysis to be conducted through Visual Analytics tools. This work addresses the design principles for such tools through a joint effort between academia and industry, specifically, Danfoss Drives, a company division in charge of the P400 SPL. Accordingly, we adopt an Action Design Research approach where answers are sought by interacting with the practitioners in the studied situations. We contribute by providing informed goals for customization analysis as well as an intervention in terms of a visual analytics tool. We conclude by discussing to what extent this experience can be generalized to product-based evolving SPL organizations other than Danfoss Drives.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities grant number RTI2018099818-B-I00 and MCIU-AEI TIN2017-90644-REDT (TASOVA). ONEKIN enjoys support from the program 'Grupos de Investigacion del Sistema Univesitario Vasco 2019-2021' under contract IT1235-19. Raul Medeiros enjoys a doctoral grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation