Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components is becoming a strategic need because they offer the possibility to build systems at reduced costs and within shorter development time. Having efficient and reliable COTS components selection methods is a key issue not only for exploiting the potential benefits of this technology, but also for facing the problems and risks involved. Searching COTS components requires to overcome several obstacles: the growing size and evolvability of the COTS marketplace, the dependencies from the components to be selected with others, and the type of descriptions currently available for those components. In this paper, we present a goal-oriented strategy for an effective localization, analysis and structuring of COTS components information. Our proposal is the GOThIC method, which provides methodological support to the construction of taxonomies. We present the seven activities that conform this method, which are illustrated with the case of real-time synchronous communication tools.

To gain competitive advantages software organizations are forced to develop systems quickly and cost-efficiently. Reusing components from third-party providers is one key technology to reach these goals. These components, also known as OTS (Off-the-Shelf) components, come in two different types: COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) and OSS (Open–Source-Software) components. However, the reuse of pre-fabricated components bears one major question: How to adapt development processes/methods with refer to system development using OTS components. To examine the state-of-the-practice in OTS component-based development a survey on 133 software projects in Norway, Italy and Germany was performed. The results show that OTS-based development processes are typically variations of well-known process models, such as the waterfall- or prototyping model, mixed with OTS-specific activities. One reason might be that often the process is selected before the use of OTS components is considered. Furthermore, the survey shows that the selection of OTS components is based on two processes: “Familiarity-based” and “Internet search-based”. Moreover, it appears that the lifecycle phase to select OTS components is significantly correlated with a project members’ previous familiarity with possible OTS candidates. Within this paper, we characterize the state-of-the-practice concerning OTS processes, using seven scenarios, and discuss how to decide or modify such processes and how to select OTS components.

Mismatches make COTS components difficult to be incorporated. In this paper, an approach is presented to eliminate mismatches among COTS components, which can truly consider COTS components as black boxes. In the approach, only the assembly description of components is required, based on which adaptors for resolving mismatches can be generated automatically. This paper also described an agent-based GUI implementation of the approach.

Domain analysis has been identified as a key factor in the development of reusable software. However, for domain analysis to become a practical approach we need to understand the conceptual foundations of the process and to produce a unambiguous definition in the form of specific techniques. This paper presents a practical approach for domain analysis based on a well defined set of guidelines and metrics. A preliminary industrial case study was performed in order to identify the viability of the approach.

This paper describes a model driven development approach for software product lines based on Web services, in which feature selection drives the dynamic customization of the product line architecture and implementation to derive the application. During product line modeling, feature and their dependencies are described in a feature model. The product line architecture is based around a client/server pattern consisting of user interface objects interacting with Web services. During application engineering, features are selected by the application engineer and used to dynamically customize the product line architecture and implementation.

Software product families provide an efficient means of reuse between a set of related products. However, software product families are often solely associated with intra-organisational reuse. This paper presents a case study of Fathammer, a small company developing games for different mobile devices. Reuse at Fathammer takes place at multiple levels. The game framework and engine of Fathammer is reused by partner companies that in turn produce game assets to be reused by Fathammer while developing games for various devices. Very rapid development of games is a necessity for Fathammer, whereas maintainability of games is not important. The above characteristics in particular distinguish Fathammer from other case studies and practices usually presented in the product family literature. The results show the applicability and challenges of software product family practices in the context of multiple collaborating companies and a fast-changing domain.

Feature models have been widely adopted in domain requirements capturing and specifying. However, there are still difficulties remaining in domain model validating and application-oriented tailoring. These difficulties are partly due to the missing of a strictly defined feature meta-model, which makes it difficult to formally represent the feature models. Aiming at the problem, we propose an ontology-based feature modeling method supporting application-oriented tailoring. In this method features are classified into several categories and are all precisely defined in the OWL-based meta-model. Expression capacity of the feature model can be greatly improved due to the rich types of features. On the other hand the feature model can be easily converted into ontology model and be validated through ontology inference. Application-oriented tailoring can also gain support from the reasoning-based guidance. Finally, advantages of ontology-based feature modeling, especially for component and architecture design, are discussed with our conclusions.

The design, usage and maintenance of variability, i.e. variability management, is a very complex and time-consuming task in industrial product families. The COVAMOF Variability Modeling Framework is our approach to enable efficient variability management. As a practical realization of COVAMOF, swe developed the COVAMOF-VS tool suite, which provides several variability views on C#, C++, Java, and many other types of projects in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. In this paper, we show how COVAMOF facilitates an engineer during product derivation, and what benefits are gained by it.

Architecture describes the organizational structure of a system including components, interactions, and constraints. Reusable components, units of software systems, have been considered to support a considerable improvement in reducing development costs and time to market because their interfaces and functionality are explicitly defined. Instead of reusing an individual component, however, it is much more advantageous to reuse a whole design or architecture. A domain architecture, sharing a common software architecture across a product line, includes common components shared by all products and optional components exploited by a subset of the products. Variability, one of the key concepts in the development of domain architectures indicates the ability to derive various products from the product line. Clearly, we need to support variability during domain architecture development. In this paper, we suggest a metamodeling concept that enables a common under-standing of architecture variability. The domain architecture metamodel reflects the Object Management Group’s (OMG^TM) Reusable Asset Specification (RAS) which addresses the engineering elements of reuse. We describe a domain architecture in which commonality and variability are explicitly considered.

Product line software engineering is a systematic approach to realize large scale software reuse. Software product lines deal with reusable assets across a domain by exploring requirements commonality and variability. Requirements dependencies have very strong influence on all development phases of member products in a product line. There are many feature oriented approaches on requirement dependencies. However, most of them are limited to the problem domain. Among those few focusing on the solution domain, they are limited to modeling requirement dependencies. This paper presents a feature oriented approach to managing domain requirements dependencies. Not only is a requirement dependencies model presented, but a directed graph-based approach is also developed to analyze domain requirement dependencies for effective release of member products in a product line. This approach returns a simple directed graph, and uses an effective algorithm to get a set of requirements to be released in a member product. A case study for spot and futures transaction domain is described to illustrate the approach.