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Integrated analysis of software product lines: a constraint based framework for consistency, liveness, and commonness checking

Published: 24 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Software Product Line (SPL) is a software development framework to jointly design a family of closely related software products in an efficient and cost-effective manner. In order to separate the concerns and handle complexity, designers usually project the SPL along different perspectives such as feature, architecture and behaviour. Each perspective deals with variability of a set of artifacts and variability constraints among them. SPL designers attempt to ensure the consistency of the individual perspectives and the SPL as a whole. They are also interested in finding the elements common to all products and the live elements (used in at least one product).
In the literature, most of the works focus on a single perspective and address the above-mentioned problems within single perspectives. There have also been attempts to express the variability of different perspectives within the feature perspective. However, since the different perspectives have different intents, coercing them into a single perspective may result in unnatural constructs in the feature perspective. Hence, it is better to keep the perspectives separate. However, in any SPL, the perspectives are closely related through an implementability relation or through constraints arising from design or business reasons. We call this the traceability aspect, which mandates an integrated analysis of the different perspectives.
In this paper, we propose a constraint-based framework where variability and traceability constraints can be uniformly expressed, at the same time keeping the different intents of perspectives intact. We describe how the consistency, liveness, and commonness problems can be reduced to problems of constraint solving. Through a realistic case study, we provide some evidence that the constraint-based framework is expressive and scalable to large SPLs.

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  • (2016)Improving software product line using an ontological approachSādhanā10.1007/s12046-016-0571-y41:12(1381-1391)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2016
  • (2015)Design and evaluation of a customizable multi-domain reference architecture on top of product lines of self-driving heavy vehiclesProceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 210.5555/2819009.2819038(189-198)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
  • (2015)Design and Evaluation of a Customizable Multi-Domain Reference Architecture on Top of Product Lines of Self-Driving Heavy Vehicles - An Industrial Case Study2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2015.147(189-198)Online publication date: May-2015
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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      ISEC '11: Proceedings of the 4th India Software Engineering Conference
      February 2011
      229 pages
      ISBN:9781450305594
      DOI:10.1145/1953355
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 24 February 2011

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      Author Tags

      1. commonness
      2. consistency
      3. liveness
      4. traceability
      5. variability

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      ISEC '11
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      • Computer Society of India
      ISEC '11: Indian Software Engineering Conference
      February 24 - 27, 2011
      Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, India

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      View all
      • (2016)Improving software product line using an ontological approachSādhanā10.1007/s12046-016-0571-y41:12(1381-1391)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2016
      • (2015)Design and evaluation of a customizable multi-domain reference architecture on top of product lines of self-driving heavy vehiclesProceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 210.5555/2819009.2819038(189-198)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
      • (2015)Design and Evaluation of a Customizable Multi-Domain Reference Architecture on Top of Product Lines of Self-Driving Heavy Vehicles - An Industrial Case Study2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2015.147(189-198)Online publication date: May-2015
      • (2014)An elementary theory of product-line variationsFormal Aspects of Computing10.1007/s00165-013-0276-526:4(695-727)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2014
      • (2012)Relating Requirement and Design VariabilitiesProceedings of the 2012 19th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference - Volume 0210.1109/APSEC.2012.67(35-42)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2012

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