A systematic review of quality attributes and measures for software product lines

[EN] It is widely accepted that software measures provide an appropriate mechanism for understanding, monitoring, controlling, and predicting the quality of software development projects. In software product lines (SPL), quality is even more important than in a single software product since, owing to systematic reuse, a fault or an inadequate design decision could be propagated to several products in the family. Over the last few years, a great number of quality attributes and measures for assessing the quality of SPL have been reported in literature. However, no studies summarizing the current knowledge about them exist. This paper presents a systematic literature review with the objective of identifying and interpreting all the available studies from 1996 to 2010 that present quality attributes and/or measures for SPL. These attributes and measures have been classified using a set of criteria that includes the life cycle phase in which the measures are applied; the corresponding quality characteristics; their support for specific SPL characteristics (e. g., variability, compositionality); the procedure used to validate the measures, etc. We found 165 measures related to 97 different quality attributes. The results of the review indicated that 92% of the measures evaluate attributes that are related to maintainability. In addition, 67% of the measures are used during the design phase of Domain Engineering, and 56% are applied to evaluate the product line architecture. However, only 25% of them have been empirically validated. In conclusion, the results provide a global vision of the state of the research within this area in order to help researchers in detecting weaknesses, directing research efforts, and identifying new research lines. In particular, there is a need for new measures with which to evaluate both the quality of the artifacts produced during the entire SPL life cycle and other quality characteristics. There is also a need for more validation (both theoretical and empirical) of existing measures. In addition, our results may be useful as a reference guide for practitioners to assist them in the selection or the adaptation of existing measures for evaluating their software product lines. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the MULTIPLE (Multimodeling Approach For Quality-Aware Software Product Lines) project with ref. TIN2009-13838.Montagud Gregori, S.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2012). A systematic review of quality attributes and measures for software product lines. Software Quality Journal. 20(3-4):425-486. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-011-9146-7S425486203-4Abdelmoez, W., Nassar, D. M., Shereschevsky, M., Gradetsky, N., Gunnalan, R., Ammar, H. H., et al. (2004). Error propagation in software architectures. In 10th international symposium on software metrics (METRICS), Chicago, Illinois, USA.Ajila, S. A., & Dumitrescu, R. T. (2007). Experimental use of code delta, code churn, and rate of change to understand software product line evolution. Journal of Systems and Software, 80, 74–91.Aldekoa, G., Trujillo, S., Sagardui, G., & Díaz, O. (2006). Experience measuring maintainability in software product lines. In XV Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos (JISBD). Barcelona.Aldekoa, G., Trujillo, S., Sagardui, G., & Díaz, O. (2008). Quantifying maintanibility in feature oriented product lines, Athens, Greece, pp. 243–247.Alves de Oliveira Junior, E., Gimenes, I. M. S., & Maldonado, J. C. (2008). A metric suite to support software product line architecture evaluation. In XXXIV Conferencia Latinamericana de Informática (CLEI), Santa Fé, Argentina, pp. 489–498.Alves, V., Niu, N., Alves, C., & Valença, G. (2010). Requirements engineering for software product lines: A systematic literature review. Information & Software Technology, 52(8), 806–820.Bosch, J. (2000). Design and use of software architectures: Adopting and evolving a product line approach. USA: ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.Briand, L. C., Differing, C. M., & Rombach, D. (1996a). Practical guidelines for measurement-based process improvement. Software Process-Improvement and Practice, 2, 253–280.Briand, L. C., Morasca, S., & Basili, V. R. (1996b). Property based software engineering measurement. IEEE Transactions on Software Eng., 22(1), 68–86.Calero, C., Ruiz, J., & Piattini, M. (2005). Classifying web metrics using the web quality model. Online Information Review, 29(3): 227–248.Chen, L., Ali Babar, M., & Ali, N. (2009). Variability management in software product lines: A systematic review. In 13th international software product lines conferences (SPLC), San Francisco, USA.Clements, P., & Northrop, L. (2002). Software product lines. 2003. Software product lines practices and patterns. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.Crnkovic, I., & Larsson, M. (2004). Classification of quality attributes for predictability in component-based systems. Journal of Econometrics, pp. 231–250.Conference Rankings of Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE). (2010). Available in http://core.edu.au/index.php/categories/conference%20rankings/1 .Davis, A., Dieste, Ó., Hickey, A., Juristo, N., & Moreno, A. M. (2006). Effectiveness of requirements elicitation techniques: Empirical results derived from a systematic review. In 14th IEEE international conference requirements engineering, pp. 179–188.de Souza Filho, E. D., de Oliveira Cavalcanti, R., Neiva, D. F. S., Oliveira, T. H. B., Barachisio Lisboa, L., de Almeida E. S., & de Lemos Meira, S. R. (2008). Evaluating domain design approaches using systematic review. In 2nd European conference on software architecture, Cyprus, pp. 50–65.Ejiogu, L. (1991). Software engineering with formal metrics. QED Publishing.Engström, E., & Runeson, P. (2011). Software product line testing—A systematic mapping study. Information & Software Technology, 53(1), 2–13.Etxeberria, L., Sagarui, G., & Belategi, L. (2008). Quality aware software product line engineering. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, 14(1), Campinas Mar.Ganesan, D., Knodel, J., Kolb, R., Haury, U., & Meier, G. (2007). Comparing costs and benefits of different test strategies for a software product line: A study from Testo AG. In 11th international software product line conference, Kyoto, Japan, pp. 74–83, September 2007.Gómez, O., Oktaba, H., Piattini, M., & García, F. (2006). A systematic review measurement in software engineering: State-of-the-art in measures. In First international conference on software and data technologies (ICSOFT), Setúbal, Portugal, pp. 11–14.IEEE standard for a software quality metrics methodology, IEEE Std 1061-1998, 1998.Inoki, M., & Fukazawa, Y. (2007). Software product line evolution method based on Kaizen approach. In 22nd annual ACM symposium on applied computing, Korea.Insfran, E., & Fernandez, A. (2008). A systematic review of usability evaluation in Web development. 2nd international workshop on web usability and accessibility (IWWUA’08), New Zealand, LNCS 5176, Springer, pp. 81–91.ISO/IEC 25010. (2008). Systems and software engineering. Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE). System and software quality models.ISO/IEC 9126. (2000). Software engineering. Product Quality.Johansson, E., & Höst, R. (2002). Tracking degradation in software product lines through measurement of design rule violations. In 14th International conference on software engineering and knowledge engineering, Ischia, Italy, pp. 249–254.Journal Citation Reports of Thomson Reuters. (2010). Available in http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/journal_citation_reports/ .Khurum, M., & Gorschek, T. (2009). A systematic review of domain analysis solutions for product lines. The Journal of Systems and Software.Kim, T., Ko, I. Y., Kang, S. W., & Lee, D. H. (2008). Extending ATAM to assess product line architecture. In 8th IEEE international conference on computer and information technology, pp. 790–797.Kitchenham, B. (2007). Guidelines for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering. Version 2.3, EBSE Technical Report, Keele University, UK.Kitchenham, B., Pfleeger, S., & Fenton, N. (1995). Towards a framework for software measurement validation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 21(12).Landis, J. R., & Koch, G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics, 33, 159–174.Mendes, E. (2005). A systematic review of Web engineering research. International symposium on empirical software engineering. Noosa Heads, Australia.Meyer, M. H., & Dalal, D. (2002). Managing platform architectures and manufacturing processes for non assembled products. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 19(4), 277–293.Montagud, S., & Abrahão, S. (2009). Gathering Current knowledge about quality evaluation in software product lines. In 13th international software product lines conferences (SPLC), San Francisco, USA.Montagud, S., & Abrahão, S. (2009). A SQuaRE-bassed quality evaluation method for software product lines. Master’s thesis, December 2009 (in Spanish).Needham, D., & Jones, S. (2006). A software fault tree metric. In 22nd international conference on software maintenance (ICSM), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.Niemelä, E., & Immonen, A. (2007). Capturing quality requirements of product family architecture. Information and Software Technology, 49(11–12), 1107–1120.Odia, O. E. (2007). Testing in software product lines. Master Thesis Software Engineering of School of Engineering, Bleking Institute of Technology. Thesis no. MSE-2007:16, Sweden.Olumofin, F. G., & Mišić, V. B. (2007). A holistic architecture assessment method for software product lines. Information and Software Technology, 49, 309–323.Pérez Lamancha, B., Polo Usaola, M., & Piattini Velthius, M. (2009). Software product line testing—a systematic review. ICSOFT, (1), 23–30.Poels, G., & Dedene, G. (2000). Distance-based software measurement: necessary and sufficient properties for software measures. Information and Software Technology, 42(I), 35–46.Prehofer, C., van Gurp, J., & Bosch, J. (2008). Compositionality in software platforms. In Emerging methods, technologies and process management in software engineering. Wiley.Rahman, A. (2004). Metrics for the structural assessment of product line architecture. Master Thesis on Software Engineering, Thesis no. MSE-2004:24. School of Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden.Sethi, K., Cai, Y., Wong, S., Garcia, A., & Sant’Anna, C. (2009). From retrospect to prospect: Assessing modularity and stability from software architecture. Joint working IEEE/IFIP conference on software architecture, 2009 & European conference on software architecture. WICSA/ECSA.Shaik, I., Abdelmoez, W,. Gunnalan, R., Shereshevsky, M., Zeid, A., Ammar, H. H., et al. (2005). Change propagation for assessing design quality of software architectures. 5th working IEEE/IFIP conference on software architecture (WICSA’05).Siegmund, N., Rosenmüller, M., Kuhlemann, M., Kästner, C., & Saake, G. (2008). Measuring non-functional properties in software product lines for product derivation. In 15th Asia-Pacific software engineering conference, Beijing, China.Sun Her, J., Hyeok Kim, J., Hun Oh, S., Yul Rhew, S., & Dong Kim, S. (2007). A framework for evaluating reusability of core asset in product line engineering. Information and Software Technology, 49, 740–760.Svahnberg, M., & Bosch, J. (2000). Evolution in software product lines. In 3rd international workshop on software architectures for products families (IWSAPF-3). Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.Van der Hoek, A., Dincel, E., & Medidović, N. (2003). Using services utilization metrics to assess the structure of product line architectures. In 9th international software metrics symposium (METRICS), Sydney, Australia.Van der Linden, F., Schmid, K., & Rommes, E. (2007). Software product lines in action. Springer.Whitmire, S. (1997). Object oriented design measurement. John Wiley & Sons.Wnuk, K., Regnell, B., & Karlsson, L. (2009). What happened to our features? Visualization and understanding of scope change dynamics in a large-scale industrial setting. In 17th IEEE international requirements engineering conference.Yoshimura, K., Ganesan, D., & Muthig, D. (2006). Assessing merge potential of existing engine control systems into a product line. In International workshop on software engineering for automative systems, Shangai, China, pp. 61–67.Zhang, T., Deng, L., Wu, J., Zhou, Q., & Ma, C. (2008). Some metrics for accessing quality of product line architecture. In International conference on computer science and software engineering (CSSE), Wuhan, China, pp. 500–503

Un Método para la Evaluación de la Calidad de Líneas de Productos Software basado en SQuaRE

La aproximación al desarrollo de Líneas de Productos Software se basa en la reutilización sistemática y a gran escala del desarrollo de artefactos tales como la arquitectura, diseño, y componentes, entre un conjunto de productos con funcionalidades similares. Esta aproximación promete, entre otras cosas, acortar el tiempo del desarrollo de los sistemas software y reducir significativamente los costes de desarrollo y mantenimiento. Para lograr las mejoras prometidas, los componentes y artefactos destinados para la reutilización deben ser de alta calidad. Por lo tanto, el aseguramiento de la calidad en las líneas de productos es aún más importante que en el desarrollo de software tradicional debido a que un error o una decisión de diseño inadecuada podrían propagarse a varios productos de la familia. Sin embargo, el aseguramiento de la calidad en las líneas de productos software es más complejo debido a las propiedades intrínsecas de las mismas, como la generalización de componentes software o la gestión de la variabilidad. Hasta ahora la investigación en el ámbito de las líneas de productos software se ha centrado principalmente en el análisis, diseño e implementación de las mismas. En particular, los desafíos del aseguramiento de la calidad que surgen en este contexto no han sido abordados suficientemente, y hay poca orientación para las organizaciones que utilizan líneas de productos sobre cómo asegurar de manera sistemática la calidad de sus líneas de productos y artefactos reutilizables. Para cubrir la escasez de métodos y técnicas, se ha propuesto un modelo de calidad específico para líneas de productos software con características, subcaracterísticas, atributos de calidad y métricas que permiten evaluar la calidad de todos los artefactos obtenidos en el ciclo de vida de una línea de productos software. Además, se ha propuesto un método de evaluación acorde al estándar de calidad ISO/IEC 25000 (SQuaRE) para guiar la aplicación del modelo de calidad propuesto. A diferencia de los métodos de evaluación tradicionales, el modelo de calidad interactúa con el resto de vistas del sistema siendo éste un artefacto activo durante el desarrollo de la línea de productos.Montagud Gregori, S. (2009). Un Método para la Evaluación de la Calidad de Líneas de Productos Software basado en SQuaRE. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/11923Archivo delegad