PlugSPL: An Environment to Support SPL Life Cycle

Abstract

In recent years, software product line engineering (SPLE) has emerged as a promising reusability approach that brings out some important benefits, e.g., it increases the reusability of its core assets while decreasing the time to market. The SPL approach focuses mainly on a two-life cycle model: domain engineering, where the SPL core asset is developed for reuse, and application engineering, where the core asset is reused to generate specific products. It is important to highlight that the success of the SPL approach depends on several principles, in particular variability management. Although the SPL engineering brings out important benefits, it is clear the lack of environments aimed at automating the overall SPL life cycle, including (i) configuration of feature model (FM); (ii) configuration of products; and (iii) generation of products. Literature and industry present several important tools that encompass part of the SPL development life cycle, such as SPLOT and pure::variants. The plugin approach has also received an increasing attention in the development of SPLs. Some SPL-based approaches are characterized by the development of different applications through the selection/development of different sets of plugins. Although the use of plugins to develop SPL products is a promising approach and several works have been published in recent years, there is no tool to fully support plugin-based SPLs. This chapter presents PlugSPL (This chapter is an expanded version of a previously published paper Rodrigues et al. (Plugspl: An automated environment for supporting plugin-based software product lines. In: SEKE, pp. 647–650, 2012).), an automated environment to support the overall plugin-based SPL life cycle. PlugSPL is a modular environment, written in C#, in which a test manager can design an SPL using the SMarty approach, configure and develop its components, define a valid product configuration, and generate a product. Although there are tools that partially give support to the SPL life cycle as, for instance, pure::variants, to the best of our knowledge, there was no tool that supported plugin-based SPLs and the overall SPL life cycle. Furthermore, there are tools to design FMs, but most of them use different notations and file formats. PlugSPL provides capabilities with regard to creating or import/export FMs from/to other tools and uses a commonly used file format. Therefore, there is no need to incorporate other tools/environments into PlugSPL. Although PlugSPL is a flexible environment for modeling FMs, its most significant benefit is supporting the generation of SPL products based on its FM. Moreover, PlugSPL automatically generates an abstract class structure, which can be used to develop third-party plugins. A PlugSPL application example is presented for deriving MBT tools from the PLeTs product line.