Abstract
A Software Product Line (SPL) is a set of systems that share a group of manageable features and satisfy the specific needs of a particular domain. The features of an SPL can be used in variable combinations to derive product variants in the SPL domain. Because SPLs promote product development through reuse, it is vital to have a means to measure their quality in terms of quality attributes like complexity, reusability,… In this paper, we propose a set of metrics to evaluate the quality of an SPL at three levels: the feature model, design and code. We adapted a set of metrics for software quality and defined new metrics to deal with the inherent characteristics of SPLs, specifically the feature model and the traceability between features, design and code. Furthermore, to assist in interpreting the quality of a given SPL, we conducted an empirical study over ten open source SPLs to identify thresholds for the proposed metrics.
Keywords
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Kang, K., Cohen, S., Hess, J., Novak, W., Peterson, A.: Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA) feasibility study. Technical report CMU/SEI-90-TR-21, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (1990)
Clements, P., Northrop, L.: Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns. SEI Series in Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2001)
Chidamber, S., Kemerer, C.: A metrics suite for object oriented design. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 20, 476–493 (1994)
Bagheri, E., Gasevic, D.: Assessing the maintainability of software product line feature models using structural metrics. Softw. Qual. J. 19(3), 579–612 (2011)
Trendowicz, A., Punter, T.: Quality modeling for software product lines. In: Workshop on Quantitative Approaches in Object-Oriented Software Engineering, QAOOSE 2003 (2003)
Torkamani, M.-A.: Metric suite to evaluate reusability of software product line. Int. J. Electr. Comput. Eng. (IJECE) 4(2), 285–294 (2014)
Zubrow, D., Chastek, G.: Measures for Software Product Lines. Technical report, Carnegie Mellon University (2003)
Benavides, D., Trinidad, P., Ruiz-cortés, A.: Automated reasoning on feature models. In: 17th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAISE. LNCS (2005)
Benavides, D., Segura, S., Ruiz-Cortés, A.: Automated analysis of feature models 20 years later: a literature review. Inf. Syst. 35, 615–636 (2010)
Berger, C., Rendel, H., Rumpe, B.: Measuring the ability to form a product line from existing products. In: Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems (VaMos) (2010)
Oliveira Jr. E.A., de Souza Gimenes, I.M., Maldonado, J.C.: A metric suite to support software product line architecture evaluation. In: CLEI 2008, pp. 489–498 (2008)
Lopez-Herrejon, R.-E., Trujillo, S.: How complex is my Product Line? The case for Variation Point Metrics. VaMoS, pp. 97–100 (2008)
McCabe, T.J.: A complexity measure. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 2, 308–320 (1976)
Oliveira Junior E. A.; Gimenes, I.M. S.; Maldonado, J. C.; Masiero, P. C. and Barroca, L.: Systematic evaluation of software product line architectures. J. Univ. Comput. Sci. 19(1), 25–52 (2013)
Frakes, W., Anguswamy, R., Sarpotdar, S.: Reuse ratio metrics RL and RF. In: 11th International Conference on Software Reuse, Falls Church, VA, USA (2009)
Frakes, W.B.: An empirical framework for software reuse research. In: Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Methods and Tools for Reuse, Syracuse University CASE Center Technical Report, no. 9014, 5 p. (1990)
Zhang, H., Jarzabek, S., Yang, B.: Quality prediction and assessment for product lines. In: Eder, J., Missikoff, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE. LNCS, vol. 268, pp. 681–695. Springer (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this paper
Cite this paper
Maazoun, J., Bouassida, N., Ben-Abdallah, H. (2018). Evaluating SPL Quality with Metrics. In: Abraham, A., Muhuri, P., Muda, A., Gandhi, N. (eds) Intelligent Systems Design and Applications. ISDA 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 736. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76348-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76348-4_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76347-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76348-4
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)