Chapter 9 - Achieving Quality in Customer-Configurable Products

Abstract

Customers of products that include or are determined by software today expect the product to be individually configurable. At the same time high quality and short delivery times are expected. As a consequence, the producer of the software must be able to develop systems that can be easily configured according to the customer’s needs in such a way that each individually configured system satisfies all quality requirements. Especially in the case of high numbers of possible configurations, it is obvious that it is not feasible to construct all system configurations and check the properties of each of them. Rather, there must be means to assure quality generically, meaning once and for all configurations at the same time. This chapter considers software product line engineering as the base technology for how to construct configurable systems and add generic quality assurance means to this process. The mechanism can be understood as a general pattern explaining how to carry over quality assurance techniques to configurable systems. This is done for two concrete techniques in the chapter: model-based testing as a technique for the assurance of functional quality and model-based deployment as a technique for the assurance of real-time properties such as responsiveness, availability, and reliability. The techniques are demonstrated using the example of a configurable flight management system as found in modern airplanes.