Variability Extraction and Modeling for Product Variants (bibtex)
by Lukas Linsbauer, Roberto E. Lopez-Herrejon, Alexander Egyed
Abstract:
Fast-changing hardware and software technologies in addition to larger and more specialized customer bases demand software tailored to meet very diverse requirements. Software development approaches that aim at capturing this diversity on a single consolidated platform often require large upfront investments, e.g., time or budget. Alternatively, companies resort to developing one variant of a software product at a time by reusing as much as possible from already-existing product variants. However, identifying and extracting the parts to reuse is an error-prone and inefficient task compounded by the typically large number of product variants. Hence, more disciplined and systematic approaches are needed to cope with the complexity of developing and maintaining sets of product variants. Such approaches require detailed information about the product variants, the features they provide and their relations. In this paper, we present an approach to extract such variability information from product variants. It identifies traces from features and feature interactions to their implementation artifacts, and computes their dependencies. This work can be useful in many scenarios ranging from ad hoc development approaches such as cloneand- own to systematic reuse approaches such as software product lines.We applied our variability extraction approach to six case studies and provide a detailed evaluation. The results show that the extracted variability information is consistent with the variability in our six case study systems given by their variability models and available product variants.
Reference:
Variability Extraction and Modeling for Product Variants (Lukas Linsbauer, Roberto E. Lopez-Herrejon, Alexander Egyed), In Software & Systems Modeling, 2017.
Bibtex Entry:
@Article{Linsbauer2016,
  author   = {Lukas Linsbauer and Roberto E. Lopez-Herrejon and Alexander Egyed},
  title    = {Variability Extraction and Modeling for Product Variants},
  journal  = {Software \& Systems Modeling},
  year     = {2017},
  pages    = {1179-1199},
  abstract = {Fast-changing hardware and software technologies in addition to larger
	and more specialized customer bases demand software tailored to meet
	very diverse requirements. Software development approaches that aim
	at capturing this diversity on a single consolidated platform often
	require large upfront investments, e.g., time or budget. Alternatively,
	companies resort to developing one variant of a software product
	at a time by reusing as much as possible from already-existing product
	variants. However, identifying and extracting the parts to reuse
	is an error-prone and inefficient task compounded by the typically
	large number of product variants. Hence, more disciplined and systematic
	approaches are needed to cope with the complexity of developing and
	maintaining sets of product variants. Such approaches require detailed
	information about the product variants, the features they provide
	and their relations. In this paper, we present an approach to extract
	such variability information from product variants. It identifies
	traces from features and feature interactions to their implementation
	artifacts, and computes their dependencies. This work can be useful
	in many scenarios ranging from ad hoc development approaches such
	as cloneand- own to systematic reuse approaches such as software
	product lines.We applied our variability extraction approach to six
	case studies and provide a detailed evaluation. The results show
	that the extracted variability information is consistent with the
	variability in our six case study systems given by their variability
	models and available product variants.},
  doi      = {10.1007/s10270-015-0512-y},
  file     = {:Journals\\SoSyM 2017 - Variability Extraction and Modeling for Product Variants\\Variability Extraction and Modeling for Product Variants-preprint.pdf:PDF},
  issn     = {1619-1374},
  keywords = {FWF P23115},
  url      = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10270-015-0512-y},
}
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