Ciarán Cawley

Applying visualisation techniques in software product lines

Software product lines of industrial size can easily incorporate thousands of variation points. This scale of variability can become extremely complex to manage resulting in a product development process that bears significant costs. One technique that can be applied beneficially in this context is visualisation. Visualisation is widely used in software engineering and has proven useful to amplify human cognition in data intensive applications. Adopting this technique in software product line engineering can help stakeholders in supporting essential work tasks and in enhancing their understanding of large and complex product lines. The research presented in this paper describes an integrated meta-model and research tool that employs visualisation techniques to address significant software product line tasks such as variability management and product derivation. Examples of the tasks are described and the ways in which these tasks can be further supported by utilising visualisation techniques are explained.

Visual Configuration in Automotive Software Product Lines

Software product line engineering has emerged as a viable and important software development paradigm in the automotive industry. It allows companies to realise significant improvements in time-to-market, cost, productivity, and system quality. One major difficulty with software product line engineering is related to the fact that a product line of industrial size can easily incorporate thousands of variation points. This scale of variability can become extremely complex to manage resulting in a product configuration process that bears significant costs. This paper introduces a meta-model and research tool that employs visualisation and interaction techniques to improve product configuration in high-variability product lines. The meta-model and techniques utilised are illustrated using an automotive restraint system example.

A 3D Visualisation to Enhance Cognition in Software Product Line Engineering

Software Product Line (SPL) Engineering is a development paradigm where core artefacts are developed and subsequently configured into different software products dependent on a particular customers requirements. In industrial product lines, the scale of the configuration (variability management) can become extremely complex and very difficult to manage. Visualisation is widely used in software engineering and has proven useful to amplify cognition in data intensive applications. Adopting this approach within software product line engineering can help stakeholders in supporting essential work tasks by enhancing their understanding of large and complex product lines. In this paper we present our research into the application of visualisation techniques and cognitive theory to address SPL complexity and to enhance cognition in support of the SPL engineering processes. Specifically we present a 3D visualisation approach to enhance stakeholder cognition and thus support variability management and decision making during feature configuration.