Product Line Architecture Design Research Articles

Interactive search-based Product Line Architecture design

Interactive search-based Product Line Architecture design

Interactive search-based Product Line Architecture design

Interactive search-based Product Line Architecture design

Intensifying the search-based optimization of product line architectures with crossover operators.

The Product Line Architecture (PLA) is a crucial artifact for the development of Software Product Lines. However, PLA is a complex artifact to be designed due to its large size and the multiple conflicting properties that need to be considered to ensure its quality, requiring a great effort for the architect. PLA designing has been formulated as an optimization problem aiming at improving some architectural properties in order to maximize both the feature modularization and the relational cohesion, and to minimize the class coupling. This kind of problem was successfully solved by multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. Nevertheless, most of existing approaches optimize PLA designs without applying the crossover operator, one of the fundamental genetic operators. To overcome these limitations, this paper aims to intensify the search-based PLA design optimization by presenting three crossover operators. These operators were empirically evaluated in quantitative and qualitative studies using three well-studied PLA designs. The experiments were conducted with eight experimental configurations of NSGA-II in comparison with a baseline that uses only mutation operators. Empirical results showed that there are significant differences among the use of only mutation and mutation with crossover. Also, we observed that the crossover operators contributed to generate solutions with better feature modularization. Finally, we could see that the proposed operators complement each other, since the experiment that combines at least two of the proposed operators achieved better results.

OPLA-Tool-ASP: a Tool to Prevent Architectural Smells in Search-based Product Line Architecture Design

Search-based algorithms have been successfully employed in Product Line Architecture (PLA) design in the seminal approach named Multi-Objective Approach for Product-Line Architecture Design (MOA4PLA). This approach generates a set of alternative PLA designs, which optimize different architectural properties. In addition to these properties, the alternative PLA designs should have as few architectural smells as possible. Architectural smells can negatively impact PLA variability, PLA extensibility, SPL maintainability, and other non-functional attributes. However, one of the main findings of a previous study is that the tool that automates the application of MOA4PLA adversely introduces architectural smells in the automatically generated solutions. In this work, we present OPLA-Tool-ASP, which is a tool that implements guidelines to detect and prevent the architectural smells Unused Interface, Unused Brick, Concern Overload, and Link Overload in the context of MOA4PLA. An empirical study was carried out to assess the effectiveness of OPLA-Tool-ASP in preventing the aforementioned smells in the resulting PLA designs. The obtained results pointed out that the proposed tool is effective in both preventing the smells and improving the architectural properties selected for optimization.

Are MAs profitable to search‐based PLA design?

The architectural properties of product-line architecture (PLA) design have been successfully optimised by multi-objective genetic algorithms (GAs). Memetic algorithms (MAs) extend GA by adding a local search after the global search process. MA outperformed GA in the context of class modelling, software testing and the next release problem. However, no studies on the application of MAs for PLA design optimisation were found in the literature. In light of this, the authors performed an exploratory study, where MA was used to apply design patterns for a search-based PLA design (SBPD) and achieved promising results. From the obtained results, they adjusted the MA-based implementation. This study aims at investigating if the MA is more profitable to SBPD than GAs. Two empirical studies that involve four PLA designs were carried out for this task by varying the pair of objective functions. Empirical results show that MA achieved satisfactory solutions, despite being influenced by the original PLA design.

Applying design patterns in the search-based optimization of software product line architectures

The design of the product line architecture (PLA) is a difficult activity that can benefit from the application of design patterns and from the use of a search-based optimization approach, which is generally guided by different objectives related, for instance, to cohesion, coupling and PLA extensibility. The use of design patterns for PLAs is a recent research field, not completely explored yet. Some works apply the patterns manually and for a specific domain. Approaches to search-based PLA design do not consider the usage of these patterns. To allow such use, this paper introduces a mutation operator named “Pattern-Driven Mutation Operator” that includes methods to automatically identify suitable scopes and apply the patterns Strategy, Bridge and Mediator with the search-based approach multi-objective optimization approach for PLA. A metamodel is proposed to represent and identify suitable scopes to receive each one of the patterns, avoiding the introduction of architectural anomalies. Empirical results are also presented, showing evidences that the use of the proposed operator produces a greater diversity of solutions and improves the quality of the PLAs obtained in the search-based optimization process, regarding the values of software metrics.

Safety-driven Software Product Line architectures Design, A Survey Paper

Software architecture design is an important step of software development. Currently, there are various design methods available and each is focusing on certain perspective of architecture design. Especially, quality-based methods have received a lot of attentions and have been well developed for single system architecture design. However, the use of quality-based design methods is limited in software product line (SPL) because of the complexity and variabilities existing in SPL architecture. With the increasing attention to software safety, improving software safety has already become a more important issue, especially for safety-critical systems. This study aims at surveying existing research on Software Product Line Architecture (SPLA) design based on quality attributes, and to give an overview of the intersection of the areas of software product line architecture design and Safety Driven Design in order to classifying existing work, and discover open issues for further research. Also this study investigates safety analysis at the architectural level, and Safety-based Software Product Line Architecture Design (SSPLAD) approaches. Safety-driven software product line architecture design seems to be a ''discussion topic. The study shows that there are a large number of SPLA design methods. However, the use of safety-based design methods is limited in software product lines (SPL) due to the variability property that can potentially result in a large number of possible systems and because of the complexity existing in safety attribute itself.

A feature-driven crossover operator for multi-objective and evolutionary optimization of product line architectures

The optimization of a Product Line Architecture (PLA) design can be modeled as a multi-objective problem, influenced by many factors, such as feature modularization, extensibility and other design principles. Due to this it has been properly solved in the Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) field. However, previous empirical studies optimized PLA design using the multi-objective and evolutionary algorithm NSGA-II, without applying one of the most important genetic operators: the crossover. To overcome this limitation, this paper presents a feature-driven crossover operator that aims at improving feature modularization in PLA design. The proposed operator was applied in two empirical studies using NSGA-II in comparison with another version of NSGA-II that uses only mutation operators. The results show the usefulness and applicability of the proposed operator. The NSGA-II version that applies the feature-driven crossover found a greater diversity of solutions (potential PLA designs), with higher feature-based cohesion, and less feature scattering and tangling.

Preserving architectural styles in the search based design of software product line architectures

Architectural styles help to improve the Product Line Architecture (PLA) design by providing a better organization of its elements, which results in some benefits, like flexibility, extensibility and maintainability. The PLA design can also be improved by using a search based optimization approach, taking into account different metrics, such as cohesion, coupling and feature modularization. However, the application of search operators changes the PLA organization, and consequently may violate the architectural styles rules, impacting negatively in the architecture understanding. To overcome such limitation, this work introduces a set of search operators to be used in the search based design with the goal of preserving the architectural styles during the optimization process. Such operators consider rules of the layered and client/server architectural styles, generally used in the search based design of conventional architectures and PLAs. The operators are implemented and evaluated in the context of MOA4PLA, a Multi-objective Optimization Approach for PLA Design. Results from an empirical evaluation show that the proposed operators contribute to obtain better solutions, preserving the adopted style and also improving some software metric values.

Quality-Oriented Software Product Line Architecture Design

Software architecture design is a critical step of software development. Currently, there are various design methods available and each is focusing on certain perspective of architecture design. Especially, quality-based methods have received a lot of attentions and have been well developed for single system architecture design. However, the use of quality-based design methods is limited in software product line (SPL) because of the complexity and variabilities existing in SPL architecture. In this paper, we introduce an extra view to the Quality-Driven Architecture Design and quality Analysis (QADA) method, in order to provide a more effective quality-based architecture design framework for SPL. In this framework, the quality attributes of a software system will be taken into account in the early stage of architecture design and the reference architecture of SPL will be elicited based on quality-related consideration.

A nonfunctional requirement tradeoff analysis approach for software product line architecture design

Software product line development paradigm allows the development of intensive products simultaneously. Nonfunctional requirement analysis for the paradigm is a challenge problem, mainly due to the massive products that are involved. Especially in the situation where some products' nonfunctional requirements are not met, how do architects keep the revision, and the impact caused by the revision both minimal? This paper investigates the issue of nonfunctional requirement tradeoff analysis for software product lines at the architecture design stage, and proposes an architectural approach to assist architects in making optimal revision decisions based on nonfunctional tradeoff analysis results. In particular, the nonfunctional requirement supported in the approach at this stage is performance. The little's law has been adopted to support performance analysis for software product line architecture design. A Unified Modeling Language profile is also developed to support performance modeling for software product line architecture design, thus to facilitate architectural performance analysis.

Automatically composing reusable software components for mobile devices

Product-line architectures (PLAs) are an effective mechanism for facilitating the reuse of software components on different mobile devices. Mobile applications are typically delivered to devices using over-the-air provisioning services that allow a mobile phone to download and install software over a cellular network connection. Current techniques for automating product-line variant selection do not address the unique requirements (such as the need to consider resource constraints) of dynamically selecting a variant for over-the-air provisioning. This paper presents the following contributions to product-line variant selection for mobile devices: (1) it describes how a constraint solver can be used to dynamically select a product-line variant while adhering to resource constraints, (2) it presents architectures for automatically discovering device capabilities and mapping them to product-line feature models, (3) it includes results from experiments and field tests with an automated variant selector, and (4) it describes PLA design rules that can be used to increase the performance of automated constraint-based variant selection. Our empirical results show that fast automated variant selection from a feature model is possible if certain product-line design guidelines are followed.