Visualizing Variability Models Using Hyperbolic Trees

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) has emerged in recent years as a viable way to maximize reuse when designing a family of related products. One of the main tasks conducted during the SPLE process is Variability Management (VM). VM is about identifying commonality among the different products being developed while capturing and cataloging variability. In real-life projects, VM models tend to encompass a very large number of variants reaching in many projects the order of thousands. Visualizing these models has been a major challenge for tool developers. In this work, we present our MUSA CASE tool which uses hyperbolic trees for representing VM models and supports gesture based interaction (using multi-touch interfaces). The tool has been successfully used to develop a large scale case study

Case Study: Using ADLARS to Design and Develop a Real-Time Network Emulator

As testing and benchmarking performance of web services and networked applications has proven to be cost-effective, and crucial in some applications, increased significance has been attached to the development of hardware and software network emulators and simulators. In this paper, we discuss a possible design of a light-weight real-time IP network emulator that can provide the same functionality and performance as hardware simulators. Also, as the systematic software engineering discipline has become a necessity in the software development life-cycle, we present a possible approach, utilizing mature software engineering disciplines, for building the software architecture of the emulator. We then use ADLARS [1], an Architecture Description Language for Real-time Systems to describe the architecture. The emulator’s architecture serves as a good test-bed for our ADL because of its real-time and concurrent nature. We conclude by testing our design and presenting a possible JAVA implementation of the emulator over a UNIX system