by Deepak Dhungana, Thomas Neumayer, Paul Grünbacher, Rick Rabiser
Abstract:
Software maintenance and evolution are among the most challenging and cost-intensive activities in software engineering. This is not different for software product lines due to their complexity and long life-span. New customer requirements, technology changes and internal enhancements lead to the continuous evolution of a product line's reusable assets. Due to the size of product lines, single stakeholders or teams can only maintain a small part of a system which poses additional challenges for evolution. This paper presents an approach supporting product line evolution by organizing variability models of large-scale product lines as a set of interrelated model fragments defining the variability of particular parts of the system. The approach allows semi-automatic merging of fragments into complete variability models. We also provide tool support to automatically detect changes that would make models and the architecture inconsistent. Furthermore, our approach supports the co-evolution of variability models and their respective meta-models. We illustrate the approach with examples from an ongoing industry collaboration.
Reference:
Supporting Evolution in Model-Based Product Line Engineering (Deepak Dhungana, Thomas Neumayer, Paul Grünbacher, Rick Rabiser), In Proceedings 12th Int'l Conference Software Product Lines (SPLC 2008), Limerick, Ireland, September 8-12, IEEE Computer Society, 2008.
Bibtex Entry:
@Conference{Dhungana2008a,
author = {Deepak Dhungana and Thomas Neumayer and Paul Grünbacher and Rick
Rabiser},
title = {Supporting Evolution in Model-Based Product Line Engineering},
booktitle = {Proceedings 12th Int'l Conference Software Product Lines (SPLC 2008),
Limerick, Ireland, September 8-12},
year = {2008},
pages = {319-328},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
abstract = {Software maintenance and evolution are among the most challenging
and cost-intensive activities in software engineering. This is not
different for software product lines due to their complexity and
long life-span. New customer requirements, technology changes and
internal enhancements lead to the continuous evolution of a product
line's reusable assets. Due to the size of product lines, single
stakeholders or teams can only maintain a small part of a system
which poses additional challenges for evolution. This paper presents
an approach supporting product line evolution by organizing variability
models of large-scale product lines as a set of interrelated model
fragments defining the variability of particular parts of the system.
The approach allows semi-automatic merging of fragments into complete
variability models. We also provide tool support to automatically
detect changes that would make models and the architecture inconsistent.
Furthermore, our approach supports the co-evolution of variability
models and their respective meta-models. We illustrate the approach
with examples from an ongoing industry collaboration.},
doi = {10.1109/SPLC.2008.26},
isbn = {978-0-7695-3303-2},
keywords = {CD Lab ASE}
}