Software Product Line Architecture Research Articles

Verifying consistency of software product line architectures with product architectures

Verifying consistency of software product line architectures with product architectures

ScrumOntoSPL: Collaborative Method of Agile Product Line Engineering for Software Resource Reuse

Agile Product Line Engineering (APLE), a relatively new approach combining the two successful methods of Agile Software Development (ASD) and Software Product Lines (SPLs), makes product lines more responsive to ever-changing customer needs or market changes. However, SPLs often fail to keep up with market demand due to high coordination costs, slow development processes, and long release cycles in the case of frequent changes in business requirements; in agile software projects, the lack of a unified specification for describing requirements leads to high coordination costs and inconvenient requirement management. Some studies in the literature have proposed optimized approaches to integrate ASD and SPLs, but they still have not covered all aspects of APLE’s characteristics, and software resource reuse is rarely considered in these approaches during product line development. In view of this, we propose a collaborative framework of agile product line engineering for software resource reuse, namely ScrumOntoSPL. The ScrumOntoSPL approach efficiently merges ASD and SPL based on the agile method Scrum, SPL architecture, and ontology technology. In ScrumOntoSPL, uniform requirement specification is constructed by utilizing ontology, and the Matching Requirement with Component (MRC) process is designed to match product new requirements and software resources stored in a resource pool. In addition, we evaluated the proposed framework and approach with CMMI. In the end, a case study of a software development tool called IMC-Tool based on ScrumOntoSPL for a universal Instrument Microcontroller Chip (IMC) is discussed. The IMC-Tool case illustrates that the ScrumOntoSPL has the advantages of dynamically managing demand changes, enhancing software resource reuse, reducing coordination costs, and reducing time to market.

Managed Evolution of Automotive Software Product Line Architectures: A Systematic Literature Study

The rapidly growing number of software-based features in the automotive domain as well as the special requirements in this domain ask for dedicated engineering approaches, models, and processes. Nowadays, software development in the automotive sector is generally developed as product line development, in which major parts of the software are kept adaptable in order to enable reusability of the software in different vehicle variants. In addition, reuse also plays an important role in the development of new vehicle generations in order to reduce development costs. Today, a high number of methods and techniques exist to support the product line driven development of software in the automotive sector. However, these approaches generally consider only partial aspects of development. In this paper, we present an in-depth literature study based on a conceptual model of artifacts and activities for the managed evolution of automotive software product line architectures. We are interested in the coverage of the particular aspects of the conceptual model and, thus, the fields covered in current research and research gaps, respectively. Furthermore, we aim to identify the methods and techniques used to implement automotive software product lines in general, and their usage scope in particular. As a result, this in-depth review reveals that none of the studies represent a holistic approach for the managed evolution of automotive software product lines. In addition, approaches from agile software development are of growing interest in this field.

A dynamic variability management approach working with agile product line engineering practices for reusing features

Agile software development (ASD) and software product line (SPL) have shown significant benefits for software engineering processes and practices. Although both methodologies promise similar benefits, they are based on different foundations. SPL encourages systematic reuse that exploits the commonalities of various products belonging to a common domain and manages their variations systematically. In contrast, ASD stresses a flexible and rapid development of products using iterative and incremental approaches. ASD encourages active involvement of customers and their frequent feedback. Both ASD and SPL require alternatives to extend agile methods for several reasons such as (1) to manage reusability and variability across the products of any domain, (2) to avoid the risk of developing core assets that will become obsolete and not used in future projects, and (3) to meet the requirements of changing markets. This motivates the researchers for the integration of ASD and SPL approaches. As a result, an innovative approach called agile product line engineering (APLE) by integrating SPL and ASD has been introduced. The principal aim of APLE is to maximize the benefits of ASD and SPL and address the shortcomings of both. However, combining both is a major challenge. Researchers have proposed a few approaches that try to put APLE into practice, but none of the existing approaches cover all APLE features needed. This paper proposes a new dynamic variability approach for APLE that uses APLE practices for reusing features. The proposed approach (PA) is based on the agile method Scrum and the reactive approach of SPL. In this approach, reusable core assets respond reactively to customer requirements. The PA constructs and develops the SPL architecture iteratively and incrementally. It provides the benefits of reusability and maintainability of SPLs while keeping the delivery-focused approach from agile methods. We conducted a quantitative survey of software companies applying the APLE to assess the performance of the PA and hypotheses of empirical study. Findings of empirical evaluation provide evidence on integrating ASD and SPL and the application of APLE into practices.

Generalized abstraction-refinement for game-based CTL lifted model checking

System families (Software Product Lines) are becoming omnipresent in application areas ranging from embedded system domains to system-level software and communication protocols. Software Product Line methods and architectures allow effective building many custom variants of a software system in these domains. In many of the applications, their rigorous verification and quality assurance are of paramount importance. Lifted model checking for system families is capable of verifying all their variants simultaneously in a single run by exploiting the similarities between the variants. The computational cost of lifted model checking still greatly depends on the number of variants (the size of configuration space), which is often huge. Variability abstractions have successfully addressed this configuration space explosion problem, giving rise to smaller abstract variability models with fewer abstract configurations. Abstract variability models are given as modal transition systems, which contain may (over-approximating) and must (under-approximating) transitions. Thus, they preserve both universal and existential CTL properties.In this work, we bring two main contributions. First, we define a novel game-based approach for variability-specific abstraction and refinement for lifted model checking of the full CTL, interpreted over 3-valued semantics. We propose a direct algorithm for solving a 3-valued (abstract) lifted model checking game. In case the result of model checking an abstract variability model is indefinite, we suggest a new notion of refinement, which eliminates indefinite results. This provides an iterative incremental variability-specific abstraction and refinement framework, where refinement is applied only where indefinite results exist and definite results from previous iterations are reused. Second, we propose a new generalized definition of abstract variability models, given as so-called generalized modal transition systems, by introducing the notion of (must) hyper-transitions. This results in more precise abstract models in which more CTL formulae can be proved or disproved. We integrate the newly defined generalized abstract variability models in the existing abstraction-refinement framework for game-based lifted model checking of CTL. Finally, we evaluate the practicality of this approach on several system families.

Software Product Line Architectures and Framework for Social Media Applications

Software Product Line Architectures and Framework for Social Media Applications - written by Bhattacharya Amitdeb , Chandrashekar Pallavi , Channarayapatna Mahesh Karthik published on 2019/11/25 download full article with reference data and citations

Feature analysis using information retrieval, community detection and structural analysis methods in product line adoption

In industrial practice the clone-and-own strategy is often applied when in the pressure of high demand of customized features. The adoption of software product line (SPL) architecture is a large one time investment that affects both technical and organizational issues. The analysis of the feature structure is a crucial point in the SPL adoption process involving domain experts working at a higher level of abstraction and developers working directly on the program code. We propose automatic methods to extract feature-to-program links starting from very high level set of features provided by domain experts. For this purpose we combine call graph information with textual similarity between code and high level features. In addition, in depth understanding of the feature structure is supported by finding communities between programs and relating them to features. As features are originated from domain experts, community analysis reveals discrepancies between expert view and internal code structure. We found that communities correspond well to the high level features, with usually more than half of feature code located in specialized communities. We report experiments at two levels of features and more than 2000 Magic 4GL programs in an industrial SPL adoption project.

A Real Options Analysis of Spacecraft Software Product Line Architectures

Software and systems engineering for aerospace platforms presents many unique challenges. The decision if, and how, to employ software product line architectures is one recurring question. Real options analysis—applying option valuation techniques to budgeting decisions—can be a powerful tool for engineering managers, project leaders, and mission directors. In this paper, we demonstrate a real options valuation approach to explore this question.

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.

An ontology-driven software product line architecture for developing gamified intelligent tutoring systems

An ontology-driven software product line architecture for developing gamified intelligent tutoring systems

An ontology-driven software product line architecture for developing gamified intelligent tutoring systems

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) are effective to provide instruction for students in several situations. Many works have been using gamification by adding game elements to learning contexts aiming to engage students and to drive desired learning behaviours. However, the design of gamified ITS should deal with a huge variability. Software product lines (SPLs) promise to offer rapid product development and more affordable development costs to build software from the same family. A key factor to successfully implement a product-line approach is to structure commonalities and variabilities into a product line architecture (PLA). In this paper, we propose a PLA for developing gamified ITSs that uses an ontology-driven feature modelling strategy. We illustrate how our architecture could be applied to instantiate a product on the basic math domain. We also discuss a set of implications of using it as well as how it could support the evolution/changing of gamified ITSs.

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 Model Based Framework for Refactoring Software Product Line Architecture

Software product line (SPL) is an approach used to develop a range of software products with a high degree of similarity. In this approach, a feature model is usually used to keep track of similarities and differences. Over time, as modifications are made to the SPL, inconsistencies with the feature model could arise. The first approach to dealing with these inconsistencies is refactoring. Refactoring consists of small steps which, when accumulated, may lead to large-scale changes in the SPL, resulting in features being added to or eliminated from the SPL. In this paper, we propose a framework for refactoring SPLs, which helps keep SPLs consistent with the feature model. After some introductory remarks, we describe a formal model for representing the feature model. We express various refactoring patterns applicable to the feature model and the SPL formally, and then introduce an algorithm for finding them in the SPL. In the end, we use a real-world case study of an SPL to illustrate the applicability of the framework introduced in the paper.

Requirement-driven evolution in software product lines: A systematic mapping study

CONTEXT. Software Product Lines (SPLs) aim to support the development of a whole family of software products through systematic reuse of shared assets. As SPLs exhibit a long life-span, evolution is an even greater concern than for single-systems. For the purpose of this work, evolution refers to the adaptation of the SPL as a result of changing requirements. Hence, evolution is triggered by requirement changes, and not by bug fixing or refactoring.OBJECTIVE. Research on SPL evolution has not been previously mapped. This work provides a mapping study along Petersen’s and Kichenham’s guidelines, to identify strong areas of knowledge, trends and gaps.RESULTS. We identified 107 relevant contributions. They were classified according to four facets: evolution activity (e.g., identify, analyze and plan, implement), product-derivation approach (e.g., annotation-based, composition-based), research type (e.g., solution, experience, evaluation), and asset type (i.e., variability model, SPL architecture, code assets and products).CONCLUSION. Analyses of the results indicate that “Solution proposals” are the most common type of contribution (31%). Regarding the evolution activity, “Implement change” (43%) and “Analyze and plan change” (37%) are the most covered ones. A finer-grained analysis uncovered some tasks as being underexposed. A detailed description of the 107 papers is also included.

Recovering software product line architecture of a family of object-oriented product variants

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) aims at applying a pre-planned systematic reuse of large-grained software artifacts to increase the software productivity and reduce the development cost. The idea of SPLE is to analyze the business domain of a family of products to identify the common and the variable parts between the products. However, it is common for companies to develop, in an ad-hoc manner (e.g. clone and own), a set of products that share common services and differ in terms of others. Thus, many contributions are proposed to re-engineer existing product variants to a software product line. Nevertheless, these contributions are mostly focused on managing the variability at the requirement level. Few contributions address the variability at the architectural level despite its major importance. Starting from this observation, we propose an approach to reverse engineer the architecture of a set of product variants. Our goal is to identify variability and dependencies among architectural-element variants. Our work relies on formal concept analysis to analyze the variability. To validate the proposed approach, we experimented on two families of open-source product variants; Mobile Media and Health Watcher. %The results show that our approach is able to identify the architectural variability and the dependencies.

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.

Declarative and Flexible Modeling of Software Product Line Architectures

Several known problems negatively affect the specification of software product lines architecture. One of them is related with a key concept known as Internal Variability. The internal variability of components is generally neglected when describing the architecture of a family of products. The impossibility to denote dynamic restrictions between features is also pointed out as a significant difficulty for achieving an architectural specification. A third problem arises when the high level abstractions needed at the architectural level are mixed with low-level artifacts as lines of code. This paper explores FVS (FeatherWeight Visual Scenarios) as a declarative language for specifying software product lines architectures in early stages of software development. FVS aims to take a step towards finding a solution to the mentioned problems.

An Ontology-Based Product Architecture Derivation Approach

Software product line (SPL) engineering has proven to improve software quality and shorten development cycles, cost and time. In product line engineering, product derivation is concerned with the realization of the variability at the implementation level. However, the majority of research works focuses on instantiating the variants selected in the final product, while the derivation at the architecture level has been poorly explored. As product line engineers often customize the product architecture by hand during the application engineering phase, the derivation and customization processes of the product line architecture (PLA) might be in some cases error-prone. Consequently, in this research we present an Ontology-based product Architecture Derivation (OntoAD) framework which automates the derivation of product-specific architectures from an SPL architecture. Our solution uses a language-independent model to specify the product line architecture and a model-driven engineering approach for architecture derivation activities. We use an ontology formalism to reason about the automatic generation of model-to-model transformation rules based on the selection of features and we illustrate our approach using a voice over IP motivating example. Finally, we report results about scalability and performance regarding the size of the variability model.

Research Notes on the Architectural Evolution of a Software Product Line

This work presents an experience report on the architectural decisions taken in the evolution of a Software Product Line (SPL) of Model-based Testing tools (PLeTs). This SPL was partially designed and developed with the intention of minimizing effort and time-to-market during the development of a family of performance testing tools. With the evolution of our research and the addition of new features to the SPL, we identified limitations in the initial architectural design of PLeTs’ components, which led us to redesign its Software Product Line Architecture (SPLA). In this paper, we discuss the main issues that led to changes in our SPLA, as well as present the design decisions that facilitate its evolution in the context of an industrial environment. We will also report our experiences on architecture modifications in the evolution of our SPL with the intention of allowing easier maintenance in a volatile development environment.

Analysis and Comparison of Software Product Line Frameworks

Software product line architectures have been much attention in the software research community in past years. Although many methods and frameworks have been used to create software product lines, but there are still many issues and challenges in this field. This paper describes the issues and challenges surrounding software product lines, then introduced four software product line frameworks. Finally, these frameworks have been compared based on the issues and challenges such that, each framework is improved which of the issues and challenges.