Hyesun Lee

Validating Consistency between a Feature Model and Its Implementation

Consistency across different lifecycle artifacts is an important issue in software engineering. In software product line engineering, validating consistency becomes even more complicated because product line assets have embedded variabilities. Commonality and variability (C&V) of a software product line (SPL) are usually captured using a feature model. Then, they are embedded into an implementation (i.e., asset code) using various techniques including preprocessor directives. However, the product line asset code often evolves without properly updating other lifecycle artifacts including the variability model, and verification of the consistency of C&V across different product line assets is a major challenge. In this paper, an approach to validating the consistency between C&V expressed in a feature model and C&V embedded in an implementation is proposed. With this approach, product line engineers can have a method for maintaining consistency of C&V across SPL assets systematically. This method has been applied to the flash memory software product line at Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and improvements have been made over the years based on the feedback.

Experience Report on Using a Domain Model-Based Extractive Approach to Software Product Line Asset Development

When we attempted to introduce an extractive approach to a company, we were faced with a challenging project situation where legacy applications did not have many commonalities among their implementations as they were developed independently by different teams without sharing a common code base. Although there were not many structural similarities, we expected to find similarities if we view them from the domain model perspective as they were in the same domain and were developed with the object-oriented paradigm. Therefore, we decided to place the domain model at the center of extraction and reengineering, thus developing a domain model-based extractive method. The method has been successfully applied to introduce software product line to a set-top box manufacturing company.

A holistic approach to feature modeling for product line requirements engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) offers the means to discover, model, and manage the requirements of the products that comprise a product line, while software product line engineering (SPLE) offers the means of realizing the products’ requirements from a common base of software assets. In practice, however, RE and SPLE have proven to be less complementary than they should. While some RE techniques, particularly goal modeling, support the exploration of alternative solutions, the appropriate solution is typically conditional on context and a large product line may have many product-defining contexts. Thus, scalability and traceability through into product line features are key challenges for RE. Feature modeling, by contrast, has been widely accepted as a way of modeling commonality and variability of products of a product line that may be very complex. In this paper, we propose a goal-driven feature modeling approach that separates a feature space in terms of problem space and solution space features, and establish explicit mappings between them. This approach contributes to reducing the inherent complexity of a mixed-view feature model, deriving key engineering drivers for developing core assets of a product line, and facilitating the quality-based product configuration.

VULCAN: architecture-model-based workbench for product line engineering

Adaptability and reusability are important quality attributes for software targeted for global market due to diverse market needs, ever increasing number of features, rapidly changing technologies, and various laws/standards of different countries. In response to these requirements, software development organizations are interested in product line engineering and searching for support tools. However, most of the existing tools for supporting product line engineering focus only on providing mechanisms for instantiating products without adequately supporting development of software assets that are adaptable and reusable. To address this problem, we provide a CASE tool, called VULCAN, that provides architecture models/patterns that are adaptable/reusable and also supports mechanisms for instantiating products from assets. We have applied VULCAN to various product lines including glucose management systems and elevator control systems, and we could experience that maintainability of the assets has improved substantially because a large portion of the assets are specifications rather than low-level code and product-specific code is generated from the specifications.

VULCAN: architecture-model-based software development workbench

Recently, software developers are faced with a fierce market competition with: diverse market needs, ever increasing number of features, and shortening product life cycle. To survive in this fierce competition, software developers are searching for methods and tools to develop various products with reduced time-to-market and improved quality. In response to these needs, we present a new CASE called VULCAN. VULCAN is a software development workbench comprising various tools for supporting the entire phases of feature-oriented product line software development from feature modeling to asset and product development. Especially, it provides several tools for supporting architecture-model-based software development where: (1) product line architectures can be specified using various architecture patterns, (2) application-specific architectures can be derived from the product line architecture specifications, (3) application-specific control components can be generated from the application architecture specifications, and (4) different deployment architectures can be configured with various component communication mechanisms. Of various tools included in VULCAN, we focus on this tool set for supporting architecture-model-based software development in this paper and demonstration.

Domain-oriented variability modeling for reuse of simulation models

Reusability is an important quality attribute for defense modeling and simulation (MS) due to the ever-changing combat simulations and new requirements. There has been research conducted worldwide for reusing simulation models. The methods proposed in these studies (including One Semi-Automated Forces (OneSAF)) support reuse of simulation components in the development of new models. As the reuse units in the existing methods are at the simulation component level, when existing components do not satisfy new simulation requirements, new components have to be developed and maintained separately from the existing ones. However, simulation components in the same domain tend to have common parts; behavior models for tactical missions and battlefield functions in the same domain are derived from the same tactical doctrine/manual, and thus they tend to have a common structure. There is a need for a new method to maximize reusability by providing “fine-grained” reuse, i.e. composing simulation components from reusable fine-grained modules (i.e. behaviors/functions). We address the problem by applying the product line engineering concept to the development of simulation components. Commonalities and variabilities (CVs) of domain-specific simulation requirements and CVs of tactical behaviors and battlefield functions are identified in domain-oriented variability modeling. Then, the CVs are used to design and implement domain-specific simulation component assets with domain-specific tactical behaviors and battlefield functions while embedding the identified variabilities. These domain-specific component assets are instantiated based on selections of variabilities and then integrated to develop a simulation model. Feasibility of the method was demonstrated in an infantry squad combat domain of the Republic of Korea armed forces.

Variability in the Software Product Line Life cycle

Product line (PL) engineering is a software engineering paradigm, which guides organizations toward the development of products from core assets rather than the development of products one by one from scratch [1–3]. Two major activities of PL software engineering are core asset development (i.e., PL engineering) and product development (i.e., application engineering) using the core assets.