Feature-Based Composition of Software-Systems

Fischer, Stefan

Feature-Based Composition of Software-Systems

by Stefan Fischer

Abstract:

To keep pace with the increasing demand for custom-tailored software systems, companies usually use software reuse techniques. Therefore companies end up with a portfolio of similar, yet not identical, software products. Over the years different kinds of reuse techniques have emerged. Despite the great benefits of these techniques, they also have disadvantages, like they requiring large investments, or do not fully allow to facilitate reuse and often lack support for evolving products. Therefore many companies are wary to utilize these reuse techniques. We focus on the reuse techniques using Software Product Lines (SPLs) and also the wide spread technique referred to as Clone-and-Own. SPLs are intended to contain the entire variability of a product portfolio. This means they have to be planned meticulously and take all the possible product variants derivable into account, which requires a large upfront investment that companies often cannot afford. Clone-and- Own on the other hand is a more ad-hoc technique where code of product variants is copied and modified to fit the customers requirements. In this thesis we introduce a tool supported approach which leverages the advantages of these two reuse techniques, yet tries to mitigate their respective disadvantages. With our approach a software engineer selects the desired features, for which the tool automatically finds the software artifacts implementing them. The approach then copies these artifacts into a new product and helps the software engineer during the manual completion by hinting which software artifacts may be missing or may need adaption.

Reference:

Stefan Fischer, "Feature-Based Composition of Software-Systems", Master's thesis, Johannes Kepler University (JKU), Linz, Austria, 2014.

Bibtex Entry:

@MastersThesis{Fischer2014,
Title = {Feature-Based Composition of Software-Systems},
Author = {Stefan Fischer},
School = {Johannes Kepler University (JKU), Linz, Austria},
Year = {2014},

Abstract = {To keep pace with the increasing demand for custom-tailored software systems,
companies usually use software reuse techniques. Therefore companies
end up with a portfolio of similar, yet not identical, software products.
Over the years different kinds of reuse techniques have emerged. Despite the
great benefits of these techniques, they also have disadvantages, like they
requiring large investments, or do not fully allow to facilitate reuse and often
lack support for evolving products. Therefore many companies are wary
to utilize these reuse techniques. We focus on the reuse techniques using
Software Product Lines (SPLs) and also the wide spread technique referred
to as Clone-and-Own. SPLs are intended to contain the entire variability of
a product portfolio. This means they have to be planned meticulously and
take all the possible product variants derivable into account, which requires
a large upfront investment that companies often cannot afford. Clone-and-
Own on the other hand is a more ad-hoc technique where code of product
variants is copied and modified to fit the customers requirements.
In this thesis we introduce a tool supported approach which leverages
the advantages of these two reuse techniques, yet tries to mitigate their
respective disadvantages. With our approach a software engineer selects the
desired features, for which the tool automatically finds the software artifacts
implementing them. The approach then copies these artifacts into a new
product and helps the software engineer during the manual completion by
hinting which software artifacts may be missing or may need adaption.},
File = {:MSc Theses\\2014 Stefan Fischer\\thesis_fischer.pdf:PDF},
Owner = {AK117794},
Timestamp = {2015.09.22}
}