Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Software product line engineering has advanced to the point where we know how to create software product lines on small to medium scales, and some organizations are having success on a larger scale. Success has come rather slowly, however, if one considers that many of the key ideas are 25-35 years old. For example, Dijkstra discussed the idea of program families in the late 1960s, David Parnas and others clarified the idea and showed how to apply it in real-time systems in the mid 1970s, and Jim Neighbors invented domain analysis in the early 1980s. Through the 1980s and 1990s we saw the systematization of product line engineering processes and their first applications. The first Software Product Lines Conference was held in 2000. Much of the development of the field has focused on technical aspects of creating product lines and producing applications. Indeed, most of the technical problems in creating product lines now seem solvable for many product lines. The Software Product Line Hall of Fame gives us examples of successful large scale product lines.

The level of software development and maintenance investment in embedded products has increased considerably over the last decade. As software product families are providing a proven approach to managing the cost and quality of software artefacts, Nokia has exploited this approach to software development for many years. This paper presents some lessons learned and the key challenges for the successful use and evolution of software artefacts.

Feature models are used to specify members of a product-line. Despite years of progress, contemporary tools often provide limited support for feature constraints and offer little or no support for debugging feature models. We integrate prior results to connect feature models, grammars, and propositional formulas. This connection allows arbitrary propositional constraints to be defined among features and enables off-the-shelf satisfiability solvers to debug feature models. We also show how our ideas can generalize recent results on the staged configuration of feature models.

Product family engineering consists of several activities commonly separated into the areas of domain engineering and product engineering. The main part of product engineering is the definition of product decisions, which means in the context of feature modeling that for each feature the product engineer has to define in what products it will be included. In the automotive domain – and probably in many other embedded real-time domains as well – the considerations that influence these feature selections are extremely complex and, at the same time, need to be documented as closely as possible for later reference. In this paper, we (1) present a detailed description of this problem and (2) try to show that existing approaches do not sufficiently meet these concerns. We then (3) provide a detailed definition of product sets as a means to solve the problem and (4) show what methodological implications arise from the use of this concept.

This paper describes a product line use case modeling approach tailored towards organizations developing and maintaining extremely long lived software intensive systems. We refer to the approach as the PLUSS approach, P roduct L ine U se case modeling for S ystems and S oftware engineering . An industrial case study is presented where PLUSS is applied and evaluated in the target domain. Based on the case study data we draw the conclusion that PLUSS performs better than modeling according to the styles and guidelines specified by the IBM-Rational Unified Process (RUP) in the current industrial context.

Home service robots have a wide range of potential applications, such as home security, patient caring, cleaning, etc. The services provided by the robots in each application area are being defined as markets are formed and, therefore, they change constantly. Thus, robot applications need to evolve both quickly and flexibly adopting frequently changing requirements. This makes software product line framework ideal for the domain of home service robots. Unfortunately, however, robot manufacturers often focus on developing technical components (e.g., vision recognizer and speech processor) and then attempt to develop robots by integrating these components in an ad-hoc way. This practice produces robot applications that are hard to re-use and evolve when requirements change. We believe that re-engineering legacy robot applications into product line assets can significantly enhance reusability and evolvability. In this paper, we present our experience of re-engineering legacy home service robot applications into product line assets through feature modeling and analysis. First, through reverse engineering, we recovered architectures and components of the legacy applications. Second, based on the recovered information and domain knowledge, we reconstructed a feature model for the legacy applications. Anticipating changes in business opportunities or technologies, we restructured and refined the feature model to produce a feature model for the product line. Finally, based on the refined feature model and engineering principles we adopted for asset development, we designed a new architecture and components for robot applications.

It is often believed that reusable solutions, being generic, must necessarily compromise performance. In this paper, we consider a family of Role-Playing Games (RPGs). We analyzed similarities and differences among four RPGs. By applying a reuse technique of XVCL, we built an RPG product line architecture (RPG-PLA) from which we could derive any of the four RPGs. We built into the RPG-PLA a number of performance optimization strategies that could benefit any of the four (and possibly other similar) RPGs. By comparing the original vs. the new RPGs derived from the RPG-PLA, we demonstrated that reuse allowed us to achieve improved performance, both speed and memory utilization, as compared to each game developed individually. At the same time, our solution facilitated rapid development of new games, for new mobile devices, as well as ease of evolving with new features the RPG-PLA and custom games already in use.

For some organizations, the proactive approach to product lines may be inadequate due to prohibitively high investment and risks. As an alternative, the extractive and the reactive approaches are incremental, offering moderate costs and risks, and therefore sometimes may be more appropriate. However, combining these two approaches demands a more detailed process at the implementation level. This paper presents a method for extracting a product line and evolving it, relying on a strategy that uses refactorings expressed in terms of simpler programming laws. The approach is evaluated with a case study in the domain of games for mobile devices, where variations are handled with aspect-oriented constructs.

When developing a product line the knowledge about the variation de gree is of vital importance for development, maintenance and evolution of a prod uct line. In this paper we focus on the variation degree of product line feature models, considering different types of variability and dependency relationships between features.

Developing a product family (architecture) means making early investments. The product family architecture roadmap has to be considered in a business context: how to optimize the expected business value? Estimating the business value of (architectural) investments is a key step. This paper proposes an extension to existing value estimating approaches by combining an NPV-based approach with strategic scenarios to deal with uncertainty and expectations about the future.