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Reverse Engineering Product Lines in Agile Environments: Lesson learned and challenges

Published: 25 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In order to meet competitive market deadlines and to reduce development costs, families of software systems are increasingly developed as Software Product Lines [2]. Adopting agile practices for product-line development brings the promise of faster time-to-market and less costly delivery, while maintaining or even improving safety. Therefore, agile practices are often adopted even though many product lines, such as medical infusion pumps, pacemakers, and flight-control systems, operate in safety-critical domains. This introduces non-trivial risks related to the safe reuse of components across multiple products. The goal is to dynamically compose demonstrably safe products within the constraints of a fast-moving, incrementally delivered project.
This talk describes these challenges, with illustrations drawn from Dronology -- a cyber physical environment for managing and coordinating the flight of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) [3]. Dronology was designed to support UAV-based search-and-rescue, environmental data collection, fire reconnaissance, commercial product delivery and other such applications. It was initially targeted toward river-rescue scenarios; and is currently being reverse engineered into a product line.
Reverse engineering a product line from a single product, especially one with safety implications, is a challenging task [1]. Within the context of an agile project, the goal is to introduce variability points that bring immediate value to the project stakeholders without breaking the system and without sacrificing safety or other system qualities. On the other hand, by strategically looking ahead, the architecture can be extended incrementally to support the desired variability points. To address incremental delivery, feature models can be evolved over time by adding new common and variable features. As features are planned for current or upcoming sprints, corresponding functional, architectural, and safety stories can be added to the backlog. Practical traceability solutions can be employed from early phases of the project to support product line engineering in order to facilitate the metamorphosis from a single product to a full-fledged product line.
These ideas, challenges, and solutions, are presented in this talk, with rich examples drawn from the Dronology system.

References

[1]
Jane Cleland-Huang. 2017. Safety Stories in Agile Development. IEEE Software 34, 4 (2017).
[2]
Andreas Metzger and Klaus Pohl. 2014. Software product line engineering and variability management: achievements and challenges. In Proceedings of the on Future of Software Engineering, FOSE 2014, Hyderabad, India, May 31-June 7, 2014. 70--84.
[3]
Software and Requirements Engineering Center. Dronology System. (????). http://sarec.nd.edu/pages/projects_uav.html

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SPLC '17: Proceedings of the 21st International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A
September 2017
253 pages
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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  • Fidetia

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 September 2017

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Author Tags

  1. Agile
  2. Dronology
  3. Product Line

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  • Invited-talk
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  • Refereed limited

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SPLC '17

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Overall Acceptance Rate 167 of 463 submissions, 36%

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