A Text-based Approach to Feature Modelling: Syntax and Semantics of TVL

International audienceIn the scientific community, feature models are the de-facto standard for representing variability in software product line engineering. This is different from industrial settings where they appear to be used much less frequently. We and other authors found that in a number of cases, they lack concision, naturalness and expressiveness. This is confirmed by industrial experience. When modelling variability, an efficient tool for making models intuitive and concise are feature attributes. Yet, the semantics of feature models with attributes is not well understood and most existing notations do not support them at all. Furthermore, the graphical nature of feature models' syntax also appears to be a barrier to industrial adoption, both psychological and rational. Existing tool support for graphical feature models is lacking or inadequate, and inferior in many regards to tool support for text-based formats. To overcome these shortcomings, we designed TVL, a text-based feature modelling language. In terms of expressiveness, TVL subsumes most existing dialects. The main goal of designing TVL was to provide engineers with a human-readable language with a rich syntax to make modelling easy and models natural, but also with a formal semantics to avoid ambiguity and allow powerful automation

A Code Tagging Approach to Software Product Line Development:An Application to Satellite Communication Libraries

International audienceSoftware product line engineering seeks to systematise reuse when developing families of similar software systems so as to minimise development time, cost and defects. To realise variability at the code level, product line methods classically advocate usage of inheritance, components, frameworks, aspects or generative techniques. However, these might require unaffordable paradigm shifts for developers if the software was not thought at the outset as a product line. Furthermore, these techniques can be conflicting with a company's coding practices or external regulations. These concerns were the motivation for the industry- university collaboration described in this paper in which we developed a minimally intrusive coding technique based on tags. The approach was complemented with traceability from code to feature diagrams which were exploited for automated configuration. It is supported by a toolchain and is now in use in the partner company for the development of flight grade satellite communica- tion software libraries

Deriving Configuration Interfaces from Feature Models : A Vision Paper

International audienceIn software product lines, feature models are the de-facto standard for representing variability as well as for configuring products. Yet, configuration relying on feature models faces two issues: i) it assumes knowledge of the underlying formalism, which may not be true for end users and ii) it does not take advantage of advanced user-interface controls, leading to usability and integration problems with other parts of the user interface. To address these issues, our research focuses on the generation of configuration interfaces based on variability models, both from the visual and behavioral perspectives. We tackle visual issues by generating abstract user-interfaces from feature models. Regarding configuration behavior, in particular the configuration sequence, we plan to use feature configuration workflows, variability-aware models that exhibit similar characteristics as of task, user, discourse and business models found in the in the human-computer interaction community. This paper discusses the main challenges and possible solutions to realize our vision