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:
Feature-Based Composition of Software-Systems (Stefan Fischer), Master's thesis, Johannes Kepler University (JKU), Linz, Austria, 2014.
Bibtex Entry:
@MastersThesis{Fischer2014,
author = {Stefan Fischer},
title = {Feature-Based Composition of Software-Systems},
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\\Feature-Based Composition of Software Systems-preprint.pdf:PDF},
owner = {AK117794},
keywords = {SCCH},
timestamp = {2015.09.22},
}