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Purposeful performance variability in software product lines: a comparison of two case studies

Published: 16 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Within software product lines, customers may have different quality needs. To produce products with purposefully different quality attributes, several challenges must be addressed. First, one must be able to distinguish product quality attributes to the customers in a meaningful way. Second, one must create the desired quality attribute differences during product-line architecture design and derivation. To study how performance is varied purposefully in software product lines, we conducted a comparison and re-analysis of two industrial case studies in the telecommunication and mobile game domains. The results show that performance variants must be communicated to the customer in a way that links to customer value and her role. When performance or its adaptation are crucial for the customer, performance differences must be explicitly "designed in" with software or hardware means. Due to the emergent nature of performance, it is important to test performance and manage how other variability affects performance.

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  • (2016)Variability Management Strategies to Support Efficient Delivery and Maintenance of Embedded SystemsProduct-Focused Software Process Improvement10.1007/978-3-319-26844-6_31(431-438)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2016

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    SPLC '16: Proceedings of the 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference
    September 2016
    367 pages
    ISBN:9781450340502
    DOI:10.1145/2934466
    • General Chair:
    • Hong Mei
    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 the author(s) 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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    • Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.: Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
    • Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies: Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education
    • DC Holdings: Digital China Holdings Limited

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    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 16 September 2016

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    Sponsor:
    • Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
    • Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies
    • DC Holdings

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    • (2016)Variability Management Strategies to Support Efficient Delivery and Maintenance of Embedded SystemsProduct-Focused Software Process Improvement10.1007/978-3-319-26844-6_31(431-438)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2016

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