Daren Nestor

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.

Visualisation techniques to support derivation tasks in software product line development

Adopting a software product line approach allows companies to realise significant improvements in time-to-market, cost, productivity, and system quality, A fundamental problem in software product line engineering is the fact that a product line of industrial size can easily incorporate several thousand variation points. The scale and interdependencies can lead to variability management and product derivation tasks that are extremely complex to manage. This paper investigates visualisation techniques to support and improve the effectiveness of these tasks.