Arfan Mansoor

Experiences of a Product Line Migration Project

Product lines are a specialized type of software architecture with a very good reuse potential and an improved quality for software systems based on the customized mass production concept. Many software companies own several projects and have extensive experiences with single product developments. Here, any further automation of the software development process and enhancements in the quality of the resulting product are very tempting promises to move from single product development to product lines. The migration of existing software products towards a product line is subject of this paper. Based on two student projects resulting in two cycle computers, the migration to a cycle computer product line is presented, analyzed as well as compared with the industrial experiences available so far. The results of this analysis are lessons learned on the technical side and challenges of the organizational migration facets. The paper summarizes the migration process to give the reader a supporting view on his own migration projects and enable the early detection of upcoming challenges and avoid possible pitfalls.

A Collaborative Approach for Effective Requirement Elicitation in Oblivious Client Environment

Acquiring the desired requirements from customer through requirement elicitation process is a big deal as entire project depends on this initial important activity. Poor requirement elicitation affects software quality. Various factors in the oblivious client environment like culture, linguistic, gender, nationality, race and politics; can affect the final deliverables. The interaction of complex values, attitudes, behavioral norms, beliefs and communication approaches by stakeholders with different values may lead towards misunderstanding and misinterpretation. This could lead towards failure or dissatisfaction of the final outcome which might cause loss to both parties. The project requires redesign or modification that could take extra time and cost to get the desired results. The oblivious nature of the client’s working environment is the major cause of poor requirement elicitation. This study focuses the issues in oblivious client environment where client is reluctant to provide desired information. This work proposes a novel requirement elicitation model for effective software development in oblivious client environment. The quality improvement results of software after using this model were verified using a qualitative survey.

Goal Model Integration for Tailoring Product Line Development Processes

Many companies rely on the promised benefits of product lines, targeting systems between fully custom made software and mass products. Such customized mass products account for a large number of applications automatically derived from a product line. This results in the special importance of product lines for companies with a large part of their product portfolio based on their product line. The success of product line development efforts is highly dependent on tailoring the development process. This paper presents an integrative model of influence factors to tailor product line development processes according to different project needs, organizational goals, individual goals of the developers or constraints of the environment. This model integrates goal models, SPEM models and requirements to tailor development processes.

Fuzzy Based Evaluation of Software Quality Using Quality Models and Goal Models

Software quality requirements are essential part for the success of software development. Defined and guaranteed quality in software development requires identifying, refining, and predicting quality properties by appropriate means. Goal models of goal oriented requirements engineering (GORE) and quality models are useful for modelling of functional goals as well as for quality goals. Once the goal models are obtained representing the functional requirements and integrated quality goals, there is need to evaluate each functional requirement arising from functional goals and quality requirement arising from quality goals. The process consist of two main parts. In first part, the goal models are used to evaluate functional goals. The leaf level goals are used to establish the evaluation criteria. Stakeholders are also involved to contribute their opinions about the importance of each goal (functional and/or quality goal). Stakeholder opinions are then converted into quantifiable numbers using triangle fuzzy numbers (TFN). After applying the defuzzification process on TFN, the scores (weights) are obtained for each goal. In second part specific quality goals are identified, refined/tailored based on existing quality models and their evaluation is performed similarly using TFN and by applying defuzzification process. The two step process helps to evaluate each goal based on stakeholder opinions and to evaluate the impact of quality requirements. It also helps to evaluate the relationships among functional goals and quality goals. The process is described and applied on ’cyclecomputer’ case study.

Requirement Patterns for Multicore Systems

The software development life cycle (SDLC) for multicore applications is different than standard sequential programming and it requires considerable changes in software design and implementation. Due to software and hardware co-design, the hardware characteristics also need important consideration. With multicore we have to analyze the decomposition, concurrency, and scheduling aspects of the application development. In this paper we will discuss the requirements engineering process from the perspectives of multicore applications, influencing forces for multicore applications. Finally requirement patterns are proposed, to be used in the requirements engineering phase of multicore projects.

Requirements on Tailoring Product Line Development Processes

Product lines offer a high level of reuse and have been successfully used in the industry [4] and are an option to modernize software systems. The continuous derivation of applications based on a product line requires the continuous change and adaptation of the product line to new and changed customer requirements without breaking existing product line application. This is a steady modernization of the product line and its derived applications. Despite the success of product lines, the development of software with the product line approach is still in its early stages when it comes to the analysis and assessment of a product line development process to enable the initial tailoring of the process and continuous adaptation to its changing environment. Development process tailoring towards an enhanced CMM level can result in a development effort reduction of up to 21% [1]. The importance of a product line for a company is given by its large number of generated applications. Thus, any changes to the environment or the derived applications require a holistic view, analysis and adaptation of the product line and its development environment. Process lines [3] are a structured approach to handle several similar product line development processes, tailor and derive development processes. A process line manages the models of methods and development processes. Given the complexity of methods and processes their management with the modeling approach is a vital necessity. This position paper presents requirements for the tailoring step of product line development processes based on process lines and concludes with the proposal of enhanced process lines.