Feature-Oriented Reuse Method Research Articles

Managing Student Mobility in Cameroon’s University Ecosystem: A FORM/BCS Approach

Nowadays, student mobility cannot be avoided in Cameroon university ecosystem. This phenomenon has many causes. Certain students live with their parents who are civil servants and they have to move with them when they are sending to a different region; another situation is link to universities newly created in cities where the cost of the live is better than in the home university city and students prefer move to these new universities. Since student circuit is not the same in each university, it is difficult to find his level in the new university and which courses he has to follow in order to complete his training. This problem is crucial in Cameroon university ecosystem and we tackle it in this paper. The Feature Oriented Reuse Method with Business Component Semantics (FORM/BCS) is a software domain engineering method that has been proposed to design an adaptable architecture for systems belonging in a same business domain. In this work, we apply the FORM/BCS method to manage student mobility in Cameroon university ecosystem. The result of this work is a management model that allows once a student gets an enrolment in a new university, to transfer credit from the student home university to the host one.

Towards Automation of the FORM/BCS Method

The software industry is facing more complex computer systems, with short development and sustainability issues. To deliver good software with these constraints, software reuse has become a central concept for minimizing design and realization costs. This study improves upon Feature-Oriented Reuse Method with Business Component Semantics (FORM/BCS), a software development method that produces adaptable architectures from reusable domain components. This is a promising method for reusable software assets and model creation. The objective of the FORM/BCS is to bring the industrial production chain to the software. This study proposes a model to automatically transform the FORM/BCS business subsystem component into a process business component. Two metamodels for business subsystems and process business components were developed. In addition, this study establishes correspondences between the source metamodel and target metamodel classes, transformation rules, and the instance of the source metamodel and generates the target metamodel instance. Detailed findings can help practitioners reduce software design costs and development time, and contribute to the advancement of knowledge in software engineering.

A Rewriting System Based Operational Semantics for the Feature Oriented Reuse Method

Recently, an extension of the Feature Oriented Reuse Method (FORM) with business components semantics (FORM/BCS) has been given. The key idea of FORM/BCS is that, it transforms the assets produced by FORM (feature models, subsystem models, process models and modules) into reusable objects of a domain (business reusable components). Since each individual business reusable component is a constituent of a business architecture (i.e a model of a domain), FORM/BCS is therefore a model-driven design engineering method whose main products are business reusable architectures. The engineering process of FORM/BCS has been formalized using a set of total maps (called constructors and refiners). This paper shows that these maps are in fact rules of a coherent rewriting system which, indeed, defines the operational semantics of FORM/BCS.

휘처-아키텍처 대응을 통한 UML 기반 FORM 아키텍처의 가변성 모델링 및 관리

FORM 아키텍처 모델은 소프트웨어 프로덕트 라인 내의 제품 개발에 재사용될 수 있는 아키텍처로서 FORM 방법론의 핵심적인 역할을 한다. 하지만 기존의 FORM 아키텍처 모델을 실무에 적용할 때 다음과 같은 문제점들이 있다. 첫째, UML(Unified Modeling Language)과 같이 표준화된 모델이 아니므로, 이 모델을 작성하기 위해서는 고유한 모델링 도구가 필요하다. 둘째, FORM 아키텍처 모델은 휘처모델과의 대응 관계를 통해 가변성을 관리만 할 뿐, 아키텍처의 가변성을 명시적으로 나타내지 않았다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 FORM아키텍처 모델의 문제점을 해결하기 위해서, 먼저 FORM 아키텍처 모델을 UML 모델로 표현할 수 있는 방법을 개발하였다. 이는 FORM 아키텍처 모델링에 다양한 UML모델링 도구를 이용할 수 있는 장점이 있다. 또한, 휘처모델과의 대응관계를 통해서 FORM 아키텍처 모델의 가변성을 효과적으로 관리할 뿐만 아니라 표현 할 수 있는 방법을 개발하였다. FORM(Feature-Oriented Reuse Method) is one of representative product line engineering methods. The essence of FORM is the FORM architecture models, which can be reused in the development of multiple products of a software product line. The FORM architecture models, however, have the following problems when applied in practice. First, they are not standardized models like UML(Unified Modeling Language) and therefore they can be constructed only through a specific modeling tool. Second, they do not represent architectural variability explicitly. Instead their variability is only managed through a mapping from a feature model. To address these two problems, we developed at first a method for representing the FORM architecture models using UML, which enables the FORM architecture models to be constructed through various available UML modeling tools. Also, we developed an effective method for representing as well as managing the variability of the FORM architecture models through a mapping from a feature model.

Value Based Pricing in the Context of Software Product Line Engineering

The Feature Oriented Reuse Method (FORM), an successor of the famous Feature Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA) method, has broaden the focus of Product Line Engineering methodologies to business concerns, especially marketing. It uses the information gathered at the marketing and product planning steps to further improve the engineering of software product lines. A drawback of the FORM is, that it does not contribute much value to concerns directly related to the marketing, such as the price of a product, the management of licenses and the settlement of some features of a product of the product line. The paper is going to show a way to extend the FORM to additionally cover the whole set of features of the product line, which carrying value for the customer, not only the parts implemented by software - the functional requirements. Namely, it focuses on the introduction of economical aspects to the domain engineering. The specialization of the original FORM is called EconFORM. The specialization is introduced by formalizing the value based pricing approach of Nagle and Hogan to a process description. This description can than be used to be integrated into a Product Line Engineering approach such as FORM. A conclusion wraps the discussion up and raises questions for future research.

Feature-oriented product line engineering

The feature-oriented reuse method analyzes and models a product line's commonalities and differences in terms of product features and uses the analysis results to develop architectures and components. The article illustrates, with a home integration system example, how FORM brings efficiency into product line development.

Product line variability support by FORM and Mecano model integration

A product line definition must cover several systems, for this reason additional requirements are included as product line assets during domain engineering. Generic assets are presented to cover all components the product line instances are built from, and their corresponding composition rules. These generic assets embrace common and variable product aspects supporting the variability in product line definition and instantiation.This paper is devoted to present the problem of handling product line variability in every life-cycle stage by the integration of the ideas of the domain engineering method FORM (Feature-Oriented Reuse Method) and the Mecano Model, which defines a coarse-grained reusable element structure.

Feature-based approach to object-oriented engineering of applications for reuse

Object-oriented technology is gaining popularity among software engineers with the goal of building reusable and adaptable software. Unfortunately, however, most methods introduced so far are not domain-oriented and do not address the issue of reuse directly. For these methods, software reuse is not the primary goal; it is only a by-product. The feature-oriented reuse method, FORM, is extended in this paper for improving the object-oriented engineering of applications for reuse. FORM concentrates on analyzing and modeling commonalities and differences in the applications of a given domain in terms of capability, operating environment, domain technology, and implementation technique features. These features are used to systematically derive objects that are tied to the features, and to develop reusable and adaptable domain architectures. We found that FORM facilitates analysis of variability (and commonality) of software before engineering and implementation start, and with this understanding, adaptability and reusability can be built into software. Feature modeling has been found to be an effective method for identifying and modeling reusable objects. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Feature‐based approach to object‐oriented engineering of applications for reuse

Object-oriented technology is gaining popularity among software engineers with the goal of building reusable and adaptable software. Unfortunately, however, most methods introduced so far are not domain-oriented and do not address the issue of reuse directly. For these methods, software reuse is not the primary goal; it is only a by-product. The feature-oriented reuse method, FORM, is extended in this paper for improving the object-oriented engineering of applications for reuse. FORM concentrates on analyzing and modeling commonalities and differences in the applications of a given domain in terms of capability, operating environment, domain technology, and implementation technique features. These features are used to systematically derive objects that are tied to the features, and to develop reusable and adaptable domain architectures. We found that FORM facilitates analysis of variability (and commonality) of software before engineering and implementation start, and with this understanding, adaptability and reusability can be built into software. Feature modeling has been found to be an effective method for identifying and modeling reusable objects. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Feature-oriented engineering of PBX software for adaptability and reuseability

Incorporating a high level of adaptability and reusability into software is one challenge that all software engineers face. PBX (Private Branch Exchange) is one such system that requires a high level of adaptability and reusability because of rapidly expanding service features, ever changing communication technology, continuously evolving standards and diverse communication laws and standards in different countries. The software engineering community has made various efforts to address the problem of enhancing software adaptability and reusability. As a result, many programming concepts, such as information hiding, encapsulation, object orientation, abstract data type and modularization, have been developed. Although adequate application of these principles requires the domain or program family perspective, most methods, so far, have been oriented toward developing a single application. FORM (Feature-Oriented Reuse Method), the domain-based software reuse method applied in this paper, concentrates on analyzing and modeling commonalities and differences in applications of a given domain and using the analysis results to develop domain-oriented architectures and software components. The model that captures commonalities and differences is called the ‘feature model’ and it is used for both the engineering of reusable domain artifacts and the development of actual application software with reusable artifacts. We found that FORM facilitates analysis of variability, as well as commonality, of software before the start of engineering and implementation. With this understanding, adaptability and reusability can be built into software. Also, feature modeling has been found to be an effective method for identifying objects. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

FORM: A feature-oriented reuse method with domain-specific reference architectures

Systematic discovery and exploitation of commonality across related software systems is a fundamental technical requirement for achieving successful software reuse. By examining a class/family of related systems and the commonality underlying those systems, it is possible to obtain a set of reference models, i.e., software architectures and components needed for implementing applications in the class. FORM (FeaturedOriented Reuse Method) supports development of such reusable architectures and components (through a process called the “domain engineering”) and development of applications using the domain artifacts produced from the domain engineering. FORM starts with an analysis of commonality among applications in a particular domain in terms of services, operating environments, domain technologies, and implementation techniques. The model constructed during the analysis is called a “feature” model, and it captures commonality as an AND/OR graph, where AND nodes indicate mandatory features and OR nodes indicate alternative features selectable for different applications. Then, this model is used to define parameterized reference architectures and appropriate reusable components instantiatable during application development. Architectures are defined from three different viewpoints (subsystem, process, and module) and have intimate association with the features. The subsystem architecture is used to package service features and allocate them to different computers in a distributed environment. Each subsystem is further decomposed into processes considering the operating environment features. Modules are defined based on the features on domain technology and implementation techniques. These architecture models that represent an architecture at different levels of abstraction are derived from the feature hierarchy captured in the feature model. Modules serve as basis for creating reusable components, and their specification defines how they are integrated into the application (e.g., asdis integration of predcoded component, instantiation of parameterized templates, and fillingdin skeletal codes). Our experiences have shown that for the electronic bulletin board and the private branch exchange (PBX) domains, “features” make up for a common domain language and the main communication medium among application users and developers. Thus, the feature model well represents a “decision space” of software development, and is a good starting point for identifying candidate reusable components.