Product Family Engineering Research Articles

On the weaving process of aspect-oriented product family algebra

It is widely reported that product family engineering contributes to improving productivity, increasing software quality, reducing cost and labor needs, and decreasing the time to market. With the growing complexity of product families, more sophisticated techniques are required to develop, maintain and evolve the product families. More specifically, we focus on the problem space of product families engineering and address the problems in modeling large-scale feature models. Recent research on feature models adopts the principle of separation of concerns at the feature-modeling level. However, current modularization approaches still have limitation for handling crosscutting concerns and unanticipated changes at the feature-modeling level. We use a language called Aspect-Oriented Product Family Algebra (AO-PFA) to tackle those challenges. To fully attain the benefits of the aspect-oriented paradigm at the feature-modeling level, this paper presents the formalization of the weaving process for AO-PFA. Moreover, since the weaving process is associated with the word problem, which is in general undecidable, we prove that the weaving process of AO-PFA is convergent, leads to unambiguous weaving results, and that its rewriting system is terminating and confluent.

Special section on the 17th International Software Product Line Conference

Today, companies develop, maintain and deploy families of similar software products (e.g., games for different models of smartphones) rather than a single product. Software product lines engineering refers to software engineering methods, tools and techniques for creating a collection of similar software systems from a shared set of software assets using a common means of production. Software Product Line Conferences started in 1996, as the premier forum for practitioners, researchers and educators to present and discuss the most recent ideas, innovations, trends, experiences, and concerns in the area of software product lines, software product family engineering and, more recently, systems family engineering, managing families of software products as a whole rather than each family member individually. This special section stems from the 17th SPL Conference held in Tokyo, Japan, in August 2013. The contributions to this special section are further elaborations of the papers presented at the conference.

Using patterns to model variability in product families

A product family can generate significant savings in cost and time by permitting software component reuse. The authors have developed a simple method of product family engineering using patterns to model variability and tested it on the European Space Operations Centre new mission planning software system with positive results.