Danilo Beuche

Variability management with feature models

Variability management in software systems requires adequate tool support to cope with the ever increasing complexity of software systems. The paper presents a tool chain which can be used for variability management within almost all software development processes. The tools presented use extended feature models as the main model for describing variability and commonality, and provide user changeable customization of the software artifacts to be managed.

Psi-Pervasive Services Infrastructure

Future systems have been characterized as ubiquitous, pervasive, and invisible. They will consist of devices that are diverse in size, performance, and power consumption. Some of these devices will be mobile, posing additional requirements to system software and applications. The focus will move from technology to deployment and ease of use of services. Consequently, traditional paradigms for reasoning about, designing, and implementing software systems and services will no longer be sufficient. We believe that this future vision will rely on a three-tier infrastructure consisting of back-end servers, infrastructure servers, and front-end clients (mobile or static, handheld or embedded). The critical question for future systems will be how to deliver services on demand from back-end servers to resource-constrained clients. If we can handle the new requirements of these systems, we can enable this computing infrastructure to offer significantly more services to users in a more pervasive way.

Modeling and building software product lines with eclipse

Software product line development (SPLD) can reduce the overall software production costs, but imposes extra complexity on the development process. Dealing with the commonalities and variabilities of the product variants and with the flexible software archiecture makes product line development a real challenge. Developers can only be successful with adequate tool support for product line development, which is still not the ”state of the art”. The demonstration shows the integration of software product line modeling based on feature models into the popular integrated development environment Eclipse. We will demonstrate that a flexible product line architecture can be build by using the modeling capabilities provided by pure::variants, an eclipse plugin for software product line development. The plugin covers all steps of product line development from requirements and variability analysis to product generation. Extended feature models are used for modeling of problem domain. Family models are used to represent the variable architecture of product line solution domains independent of the programming or modeling languages used for product line implementation. Along some concrete examples from the domain of embedded software product lines we will make a round-trip through all steps of the development from domain analysis to product deployment and demonstrate how pure::variants facilitates the entire process. We will show how features are used to model problem domains, how product line architectures are connected with domain models and finally how to integrate concepts of model driven development into the process of product derivation.

JPURE - A Purified Java Execution Environment for Controller Networks

This paper presents an approach how to make microcontrollers able to execute Java applications with very small resource consumption compared to existing Java execution environments. The approach is based on the exploitation of the distributed computing power available in distributed controller network.

Streamlining object-oriented software for deeply embedded applications

Most of todays computer systems are embedded and a substantial amount of them are deeply embedded systems with very limited resources. Object-oriented software is rarely to be found in those systems. We discuss reasons why object orientation is seldom used in this area. We also propose a set of design and implementation techniques based on modern object-oriented methods, which reconcile the reusability and flexibility of object-oriented software with the required efficiency of deeply embedded systems.

Variant management for embedded software product lines with pure::consul and AspectC++

Software for embedded systems faces some special constraints not found in other domains. One of these constraints is a hard limitation on available RAM/ROM, processing power, and other resources. To cope with these limitations without losing the reusability of the software components, product line technologies are a promising approach. However, adequate tools for variant management are still rare. In the demonstration we will apply Pure::Consul [1], a tool which supports the description of problem and solution domains of product lines, software families, or other variable artifacts in a highly flexible manner, to a realistic application scenario: a weather station product line running on a small 8 bit microcontroller with only a few KBytes of memory. The implementation of the presented product line is based on AspectC++, an aspect-oriented extension to C++ [3]. We will demonstrate that by applying aspect-oriented software development, the number of configuration points in the code can be reduced. Both tools together form an ideal tool chain for embedded software product line development as one reduces the configuration complexity on the source code level, while the other helps to manage the variability on the abstract feature level and provides a mapping of features to aspects, classes, or other modularization units.

Finegrained Application Specific Customization of Embedded Software

The paper describes techniques, which have been developed to simplify the customization of the PURE operating system family for embedded systems and can be applied to almost any embedded software intended for reuse. The approach is based on feature modeling and the use of aspect-oriented programming and supported by a complete tool chain.