The recommendation in the product line configuration process

International audienceIn this paper, we present our research problem and we highlight the idea of our approach. Product lines are complex configurable products that are composed by features and constraints between them. Configuring a customizable product that meets user requirements with respect to product line constraints is a hard task for the user. Thus, a recommendation process is required to guide the user configuring products. Our research goal is to propose a method that combines recommendation and configuration in an interactive and dynamic way

Defects in Product Line Models and How to Identify Them

This chapter is about generic (language-independent) verification criteria of product line models, its identification, formalisation, categorization, implementation with constraint programming techniques and its evaluation on several industrial and academic product line models represented with several languages

Eighth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering—Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ’02)

International audienc

Combining configuration and recommendation to enable an interactive guidance of product line configuration

This paper is interested in e-commerce for complex configurable products/systems. E-commerce makes a wide use of recommendation techniques to help customers identify relevant products or services in large collections of offers. One particular way to achieve this is to offer customers a panel of options among which they can select their preferred ones. A trend in the industry is to go a step further, beyond the selection of pre-defined products from a catalogue by handling products customization. The systems engineering community has shown that, based on product line engineering methods, techniques and tools, it is possible to produce customized products efficiently and at low cost. The problem is that there are usually so many products in a PL that it is impossible to specify all of them explicitly, and therefore traditional recommendation techniques cannot be simply applied. This paper proposes an approach that combines two complementary forms of guidance: configuration and recommendation, to help customers define their own products out of a product line specification. The proposed approach, called interactive configuration supports the combination by organizing the configuration process in a series of partial configurations where decisions are made by the recommendation. This paper illustrates this process by applying it to an example with the content based method for recommendation and the a priori configuration approach

A Novel Approach for Process Mining : Intentional Process Models Discovery

International audienceSo far, process mining techniques have suggested to model processes in terms of tasks that occur during the enactment of a process. However, research on method engineering and guidance has illustrated that many issues, such as lack of flexibility or adaptation, are solved more effectively when intentions are explicitly specified. This paper presents a novel approach of process mining, called Map Miner Method (MMM). This method is designed to automate the construction of intentional process models from process logs. MMM uses Hidden Markov Models to model the relationship between users' activities logs and the strategies to fulfill their intentions. The method also includes two specific algorithms developed to infer users' intentions and construct intentional process model (Map) respectively. MMM can construct Map process models with different levels of abstraction (fine-grained and coarse-grained process models) with respect to the Map metamodel formalism (i.e., metamodel that specifies intentions and strategies of process actors). This paper presents all steps toward the construction of Map process models topology. The entire method is applied on a large-scale case study (Eclipse UDC) to mine the associated intentional process. The likelihood of the obtained process model shows a satisfying efficiency for the proposed method

Deriving Product Line Requirements: the RED-PL Guidance Approach

Product lines (PL) modeling have proven to be an effective approach to reuse in software development.Several variability approaches were developed to plan requirements reuse, but only little of them actuallyaddress the issue of deriving product requirements.This paper presents a method, RED-PL that intends to support requirements derivation. The originality ofthe proposed approach is that (i) it is user-oriented, (ii) it guides product requirements elicitation andderivation as a decision making activity, and (iii) it provides systematic and interactive guidance assistinganalysts in taking decisions about requirements. The RED-PL methodological process was validatedin an industrial setting by considering the requirement engineering phase of a product line of blood analyzers

Criteria for the verification of feature models

Product Line (PL) based development is a promising approach to develop software intensive systems. Experience already report multiple benefits, such as reduced time to market, better reuse, and reduced development costs. PL modelling languages, in particular to create feature models (FMs), and PL configuration processes are now supported by market tools. Although there is a wealth of research works on the theme of FM verification, there is to our knowledge no comprehensive method, technique or tool. However, it is crucial that when verifying a FM, the right criteria are considered: any error in a FM will inevitably spread to the configured software and generate PL architecture stability issues, with a serious risk of undermining the expected benefits. Dealing with key issues such as selecting the 'right' set of verification criteria or defining a small core of criteria from which all other could be derived calls for a consistent definition of all the criteria. This paper presents an original literature survey of FM verification criteria in which all the criteria are (i) classified according to their purpose and (ii) formalized consistently using first order logic

Security requirements analysis based on security and domain ontologies

International audienceSecurity is the discipline concerned with protecting systems from a wide range of threats (malice, error or mischief) that break the system by exploiting a vulnerability, i.e. a property of the system or its environment that, when faced with particular threats, can lead to failure[5] . Security is a multi-faceted problem; it is as much about understanding the domain in which systems operate as it is about the systems themselves. While developing security facilities such as encryption,identity control, or specific architectures is important, our attention should be drawn at looking into the sociotechnical context in which target systems will operate and threats that may arise and their potential harm, so as to uncover security requirements. Recent research has argued about the importance of considering security at the early stages of the information systems development process, and especially the need to consider security during RE. An ontology, in the field of knowledge representation, is most often defined as "a representation of a conceptualization". It should represent a shared conceptualization in order to have any useful purpose. Ontologies are useful for representing and interrelating many types of knowledge. Several security ontologies have been proposed. Domain ontologies are formal descriptions of classes of concepts and relationships between these concepts that describe a given domain. Our previous experience with RITA, a requirements elicitation method that exploits a just one threat ontology, was that "being generic, the threats in the RITA ontology are not specific to the target [bank] industry" (the case study was in the banking sector). Experts involved in the evaluation complained about "the lack of specificity of the types of threats to the industry sector and the problem domain at hand". The problem that remains open is therefore that we need to exploit both security knowledge and domain knowledge to guide the elicitation of domain-specific security requirements. Our research question is "how to combine the use of security ontologies and domain ontologies to guide requirements elicitation efficiently?" This paper presents an ongoing research project that aims to develop a method that explores the use of security and domain ontologies for SRE

VMWare: Tool Support for Automatic Verification of Structural and Semantic Correctness in Product Line Models

International audienceThe verification of variability models is recognized as one of the key challenges for automated development of product lines. Some computational tools have been proposed to verify product line models and product line configurations models. VMWare is a tool integrating different criteria to verify structural and semantic correctness of models derived from the FORE metamodel. Our tool gives the possibility of (i) build feature-based product line models and product line configuration models, (ii) verify their structural and semantic correctness in a completely automated manner and (iii) import/export them in XMI files