Duhoux, Benoît

Dumas, Bruno

Mens, Kim

English

Repository of the University of Namur

RESEARCH OUTPUTS / RÉSULTATS DE RECHERCHEAuthor(s) - Auteur(s) :Publication date - Date de publication :Permanent link - Permalien :Rights / License - Licence de droit d’auteur :Bibliothèque Universitaire Moretus PlantinInstitutional Repository - Research PortalDépôt Institutionnel - Portail de la Rechercheresearchportal.unamur.beUniversity of NamurA Feature-Based Context-Oriented Approach to Dynamic Software EvolutionDuhoux, Benoît; Mens, Kim; Dumas, BrunoPublication date:2020Link to publicationCitation for pulished version (HARVARD):Duhoux, B, Mens, K & Dumas, B 2020, 'A Feature-Based Context-Oriented Approach to Dynamic SoftwareEvolution', Paper presented at BENEVOL 2020, Luxembourg, 3/12/20 - 4/12/20.General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ?Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediatelyand investigate your claim.Download date: 19. Nov. 2022A Feature-Based Context-Oriented Approach toDynamic Software EvolutionBenoı̂t DuhouxICTEAMUniversité catholique de Louvainbenoit.duhoux@uclouvain.beKim MensICTEAMUniversité catholique de Louvainkim.mens@uclouvain.beBruno DumasPReCISE / NADIUniversité de Namurbruno.dumas@uclouvain.beAbstract—Context-oriented programming enables dynamicsoftware evolution by supporting the creation of software systemsthat dynamically adapt their behaviour depending on the contextof their surrounding environment. Conceiving such systems iscomplex through due to their high dynamicity and the combina-torial explosion of possible contexts and corresponding featuresthat could be active. We present the current status of our feature-based context-oriented programming approach, illustrate how ithelps software developers to conceive highly-dynamic systems,and discuss some remaining challenges of our approach.I. INTRODUCTIONContext-aware systems [1] are systems that are aware oftheir surrounding environment and adapt their behaviour atruntime depending on contextual changes in that environment.Context-oriented programming [2] is a particular programmingmethodology to build such systems. Upon sensing a newparticular situation in the surrounding environment, which isreified as a context, the system activates this context andthen continues by selecting and activating fine-grained featurescorresponding to that context. These features, representingfunctionalities specific to that context, are then installed in thesystem to refine its behaviour at runtime [3]. Such systemsthus evolve dynamically depending on the contexts describingtheir surrounding environment. Designing and building suchsystems using context-oriented programming remains quitecomplex due to their high variability and dynamicity. Wepresent our particular feature-based context-oriented program-ming approach and illustrate how it can help software devel-opers to design and implement such highly dynamic systems.II. A FEATURE-BASED CONTEXT-ORIENTED APPROACHDesigning feature-based context-oriented systems can bequite complex because the designers have to think about whatfeatures such a system should have and to what contextsit should adapt their behaviour. Adapted components canrange from user interface components to core logic or evendata components. Designers should take into account whichcontexts trigger which features. They also need to model andrespect dependencies and constraints between the contexts, andbetween features. Designing and developing such programsthus remains a quite challenging task.In order to help designers and developers of context-awaresystems in their complex task, over the past few years we havebeen developing and refining a feature-based context-orientedsoftware development approach.The first aspect we tackled concerns the foundations ofthe approach, i.e., how systems are conceived in terms ofa context model, a feature model and the mapping betweenthem. In more traditional context-oriented programming lan-guages, contexts and their behavioural adaptations are morestrongly linked than in our approach which tries to makea clear separation between them, as inspired by Hartmannand Trew [4]. This separation makes it easier to model thecontexts that reify situations in the surrounding environment,the features that implement the behavioural adaptations, andwhat features are triggered by what contexts.We then proposed an actual implementation of such afeature-based context-oriented programming language [5], twovisualisations tools to better inspect some key language con-cepts [6], [7], and conducted several case studies to validatethe language concepts. Finally, we worked on an incrementalsoftware development methodology to help stakeholders con-ceive such highly dynamic systems.Despite our current progress, several important issues re-main to be explored such as the data concern or testing. Howcan we conceive or query databases in such a context-orientedfashion? How can we test such systems to ensure code quality,coverage and predictability? Finally, how can we help end-users to accept and adopt such dynamic evolutive systems?REFERENCES[1] G. D. Abowd, A. K. Dey, P. J. Brown, N. Davies, M. Smith, andP. Steggles, “Towards a better understanding of context and context-awareness,” in Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing. Springer, 1999,pp. 304–307.[2] R. Hirschfeld, P. Costanza, and O. Nierstrasz, “Context-oriented program-ming,” Journal of Object Technology, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 125–151, 2008.[3] K. Mens, N. Cardozo, and B. Duhoux, “A context-oriented softwarearchitecture,” in COP ’16. ACM, 2016, pp. 7–12.[4] H. Hartmann and T. Trew, “Using feature diagrams with context variabil-ity to model multiple product lines for software supply chains,” in SPLC’08. IEEE, 2008, pp. 12–21.[5] B. Duhoux, K. Mens, and B. Dumas, “Implementation of a feature-basedcontext-oriented programming language,” in COP ’19. ACM, 2019, pp.9–16.[6] B. Duhoux, B. Dumas, H. S. Leung, and K. Mens, “Dynamic visualisationof features and contexts for context-oriented programmers,” in EICS ’19.ACM, 2019.[7] B. Duhoux, K. Mens, and B. Dumas, “Feature visualiser: An inspectiontool for context-oriented programmers,” in COP ’18. ACM, 2018, pp.15–22.

A Feature-Based Context-Oriented Approach to Dynamic Software Evolution

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A Feature-Based Context-Oriented Approach to Dynamic Software Evolution

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