Product Line Assets Research Articles

A Reusable Product Line Asset in Smart Mobile Application: A Systematic Literature Review

A reusable product line asset is a product or asset that can be reused for different purposes including charity. Smart mobile applications are one of several communication and information methods used in charitable activities. Web, mobile, or hybrid platforms can be used to develop charity applications. It takes design and purpose to build an application, whether methodology or software development is applied for the smooth design or development of an application. The data for this study were acquired from the appropriate literature between 2017 and 2021 in order to determine the application development on current charity applications. The Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was employed in this study. The SLR method is used to identify, review, evaluate, and analyze all available research on relevant topics, as well as research issues for philanthropic development. This study aims to answer the following research questions: identify the donation applications that are frequently developed by researchers; identify the methods that are commonly used in the development of charity applications; identify the application platform that is frequently used; identify the functions utilized to the developed application and identify the key users who are using the application. The findings show, charity donations app, structured method, mobile applications, authentication and charity centers and donors were the most often observed in this study.

Leveraging variability modeling to address metamodel revisions in Model-based Software Product Lines

Metamodels evolve over time, which can break the conformance between the models and the metamodel. Model migration strategies aim to co-evolve models and metamodels together, but their application is currently not fully automatizable and is thus cumbersome and error prone. We introduce the Variable MetaModel (VMM) strategy to address the evolution of the reusable model assets of a model-based Software Product Line. The VMM strategy applies variability modeling ideas to express the evolution of the metamodel in terms of commonalities and variabilities. When the metamodel evolves, changes are automatically formalized into the VMM and models that conform to previous versions of the metamodel continue to conform to the VMM, thus eliminating the need for migration. We have applied both the traditional migration strategy and the VMM strategy to a retrospective case study that includes 13years of evolution of our industrial partner, an induction hobs manufacturer. The comparison between the two strategies shows better results for the VMM strategy in terms of model indirection, automation, and trust leak.

Addressing metamodel revisions in model-based software product lines

Metamodels evolve over time, which can break the conformance between the models and the metamodel. Model migration strategies aim to co-evolve models and metamodels together, but their application is not fully automatizable and is thus cumbersome and error prone. We introduce the Variable MetaModel (VMM) strategy to address the evolution of the reusable model assets of a model-based Software Product Line. The VMM strategy applies variability modeling ideas to express the evolution of the metamodel in terms of commonalities and variabilities. When the metamodel evolves, the models continue to conform to the VMM, avoiding the need for migration. We have applied both the traditional migration strategy and the VMM strategy to a retrospective case study that includes 13 years of evolution of our industrial partner, an induction hobs manufacturer. The comparison between the two strategies shows better results for the VMM strategy in terms of model indirection, automation, and trust leak.

A Systems Approach to Product Line Requirements Reuse

Product line engineering has become the main method for achieving systematic software reuse. Embracing requirements in a product line's asset base enhances the effectiveness of reuse as engineers can work on the abstractions closer to the domain's initial concepts. Conventional proactive approaches to product line engineering cause excessive overhead when codifying the assets. In this paper, we propose a systems-oriented approach to extracting functional requirements profiles. The validated extraction constructs are amenable to semantic case analysis and orthogonal variability modeling, so as to uncover the variation structure and constraints. To evaluate our approach, we present an experiment to quantify the extraction overhead and effectiveness and a case study to assess our approach's usefulness. The results show that our automatic support offers an order-of-magnitude saving over the manual extraction effort without significantly compromising quality and that our approach receives a positive adoption rate by systems engineers.

Variability Management Tools: readiness for industrial use

Software product line engineering is widespread approach for software development. Variability management aims to management for various reusable assets of product line. Variability management is one of the key activity in software product line engineering. In this paper we try to answer the question Are variability management tools ready for industry use? For that purpose we review existing variability management tools: TVL, SPLOT, FeatureIDE, XFeature, FMP, FeatureMapper, CVL Tool, PLUM, pure::variants, DocLine, Gears. We estimate current state, features and industrial applications for each tool, and outline the state of the area as a whole.

Strategies for testing products in software product lines

The software product line engineering strategy enables the achievement of significant improvements in quality through reuse of carefully crafted software assets across multiple products. However, high levels of quality in the software product line assets, which are used to create products, must be accompanied by effective and efficient test strategies for the products in the software product line. The goal of this study is to understand which strategies for testing products in software product lines have been reported in the literature, enabling discussions on the significant issues, and also pointing out further research directions. A systematic literature review was carried out that identified two hundred seventy-three papers, published from the years 1998 and early in 2012. From such a set of papers, a systematic selection resulted in forty-one relevant papers. The analysis of the reported strategies comprised two important aspects: the selection of products for testing, and the actual test of products. The findings showed a range of strategies, dealing with both aspects, but few empirical evaluations of their effectiveness have been performed, which limits the inferences that can be drawn.

An Ideal Schema Design of an Industrialized PL-ISEE Database Platform

Using the automation production and management system of modern manufacturing industry product line for reference, a new industrialized PL-ISEE (product line based integrated software engineering environment) model was proposed by us in reference [4]. In the new model, the middle part in the PL-ISEE architecture is data layer which is composed of the software components bus and environment database platform to achieve the storage and managements of product line core assets data. In this paper, the environment database platform architecture and its schema design as well as implementation mechanism are further researched. Whole database platform architecture consists of the product line asset objects management service and core assets database system. The data model and database schema of the database system are designed and created by using a united core asset concept model and data organization model. The database supporting platform with the model and schema can well satisfy all the requirements of interfaces, tools and data integration as well as product line assembling production in the PL-ISEE. Therefore, the design and realizing ideas of the PL-ISEE database platform will be useful for researching on product line engineering and methodology in the future.

A feature-oriented approach for developing reusable product line assets of service-based systems

Service orientation (SO) is a relevant promising candidate for accommodating rapidly changing user needs and expectations. One of the goals of adopting SO is the improvement of reusability, however, the development of service-based system in practice has uncovered several challenging issues, such as how to identify reusable services, how to determine configurations of services that are relevant to users’ current product configuration and context, and how to maintain service validity after configuration changes. In this paper, we propose a method that addresses these issues by adapting a feature-oriented product line engineering approach. The method is notable in that it guides developers to identify reusable services at the right level of granularity and to map users’ context to relevant service configuration, and it also provides a means to check the validity of services at runtime in terms of invariants and pre/post-conditions of services. Moreover, we propose a heterogeneous style based architecture model for developing such systems.

프로덕트라인 아키텍처 기반 RFID 애플리케이션 개발을 위한 프레임워크

소프트웨어 프로덕트 라인은 소프트웨어 재사용에 대한 활동들을 미리 계획하고 개발 프로세스의 연속적인 부분으로 이루어지도록 지원하기 위한 방법이다. 이 방법에서 가장 중요한 기술은 관련된 시스템들, 즉 도메인에서 공통성과 가변성(commonality and variability: C&V)을 분석하고 관리하는 것이다. 본 논문에서는 소프트웨어 프로덕트 라인 방법과 RFID 적용 기술을 결합시키고자 한다. 즉, 각 기업 또는 도메인마다 RFID 기술을 도입하려고 할 때, 애플리케이션이 공통적으로 처리해야 하는 활동들을 식별하고 각 활동들이 가지는 가변요소들을 분석하여, 이를 재사용 가능한 소프트웨어 프로덕트 라인 아키텍처로 자산화 하는 방법을 제시한다. 또한 이를 실현하기 위하여 재사용 가능한 프로덕트 라인 아키텍처를 모델링 할 수 있고 식별된 공통된 기능들을 재사용 가능한 컴포넌트로 제공해주는 프레임워크를 개발한다. 공통된 아키텍처를 공유하고 반복적인 기능들을 자산으로 만들어 재사용하는 것은 경제적인 측면과 품질에서 상당한 이점을 가져다 준다. Software produce line engineering is a method that prepares for future reuse and supports seamless reuse in the application development process. Analyzing the commonality and variability between products in a product line is one of the essential concerns that must be considered when building a product line. In this paper, we suggest to combine a product line engineering approach with RFID applications technology. More concretely, common activities are identified among the RFID-enable applications and the variability in the common activities is analyzed in detail. Then, we suggest reusable product line architecture as a product line asset. In addition, as a tool for supporting this research, a framework which provides both reusable product line architecture for REID applications and the components that implement concrete realization of the architecture is developed. Sharing a common architecture and reusing assets to deploy recurrent services may be considered an advantage in terms of economic significance and overall quality.

XVCL: a mechanism for handling variants in software product lines

Software reuse focused on product lines has emerged as one of the promising ways to increase software productivity and quality. XVCL (XML-based Variant Configuration Language) is a variability mechanism that we developed for handling variants in software product lines. We apply XVCL to develop product line assets (including the domain model, product line architecture and generic components) as a set of x-frames that are capable of accommodating both commonality and variability in a domain. Specific systems, members of a product line, can be constructed by adapting and composing x-frames. In this paper, we illustrate our approach using examples from our product line project on the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) domain.

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.

Implementing product line variabilities

Software product lines have numerous members. Thus, a product line infrastructure must cover various systems. This is the significant difference to usual software systems and the reason for additional requirements on the various assets present during software product line engineering. It is imperative that they support the description of the product line as a whole, as well as its instantiation for the derivation of individual products. Literature has already addressed how to create and instantiate generic product line assets, such as domain models and architectures to generate instance specific ones [1, 2, 3], yet little attention has been given on how to actually deal with this genericity at the code level. This paper addresses the issue of handling product line variability at the code level. To this end various implementation approaches are examined with respect to their use in a product line context.