SMartyModeling: an Environment for Engineering UML-based Software Product Lines

Abstract

Software Product Line (SPL) has been successfully consolidated as an approach for systematic reuse. The adoption of the SPL approach aims at increasing the reuse of requirements and artifacts, thus reusing documents, source code and artifacts and ensuring better quality control to software production in a large-scale. One of the essential activities for SPL management is the modeling of variability. Variability modeling in UML-based SPL has been carried out mostly using the UML Profiling mechanism, in which new stereotypes and tagged values are created for such purpose. The available option in general-purpose UML tools for exporting UML models is through XMI files, standardized by OMG. This option is important to process XMI files in particular environments or tools, for example, managing variabilities, generating product configurations from an SPL, and even collecting metrics, and estimating SPLs. However, different versions, tool restrictions, and different file standards compromise operations involving XMI files. In this scenario, the industry has increasingly required the supporting tools for the SPL approach. However, the current support tools are mainly restricted to the problem space based on feature modeling and present problems with data integration with other tools. Therefore, we developed SMartyModeling, an environment for engineering UML-based SPLs in which variabilities are modeled as stereotypes using any UML compliant profile. This paper presents an overview of SMartyModeling, describing its motivation, main components, and available features.