Maximiliano Arias

Towards systematic software reuse of GIS: Insights from a case study

With the development and adoption of geographic information systems, there is an increasingly amount of software resources being stored or recorded as products to be reused. At the same time, complexity of geographic services is addressed through standardization, which allows developers reaching higher quality levels. In this paper, we introduce our domain-oriented approach to developing geographic software product lines focusing on the experiences collected from a case study. It was developed in the Marine Ecology Domain (Patagonia, Argentina) and illustrates insights of the process.

Marine ecology service reuse through taxonomy-oriented SPL development

Nowadays, reusing software applications encourages researchers and industrials to collaborate in order to increase software quality and to reduce software development costs. However, effective reuse is not easy and only a limited portion of reusable models actually offers effective evidence regarding their appropriateness, usability and/or effectiveness. Focusing reuse on a particular domain, such as marine ecology, allows us to narrow the scope; and along with a systematic approach such as software product line development, helps us to potentially improving reuse. From our experiences developing a subdomain-oriented software product line (SPL for the marine ecology subdomain), in this paper we describe semantic resources created for assisting this development and thus promoting systematic software reuse. The main contributions of our work are focused on the definition of a standard conceptual model for marine ecology applications together with a set of services and guides which assist the process of product derivation. The services are structured in a service taxonomy (as a specialization of the ISO 19119 std) in which we create a new set of categories and services built over a conceptual model for marine ecology applications. We also define and exemplify a set of guides for composing the services of the taxonomy in order to fulfill different functionalities of particular systems in the subdomain. HighlightsSolutions for software reuse for GIS domains by using standard information.Domain-specific taxonomy for supporting the generation of software artifacts.Guides for using geographic services in order to fulfill different GIS functionalities of systems in the domain.Evaluation of the effectiveness of the taxonomy and guides when building an SPL and two derived products.Improvements on time and costs of new GIS products being developed.

SeVaTax: service taxonomy selection & validation process for SPL development

Variability management is a key activity in Software Product Lines (SPL) development. To be more specific, the product selection and verification allow us to generate correct derivations. In this work we present a process, called SeVaTax, to guide the selection and validation activities -both in domain and application engineering- together with a supporting tool.

A Framework for Managing Requirements of Software Product Lines

Abstract An emerging problem in the Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is the need for integral management of planned reuse. In SPLE there are two instances where managing requirements gains relevance. The first one arises during the construction of SPLs based on legacy software or previously developed SPLs. The second one appears when instantiating products from the SPLplatform, where instantiating variability meets the custom requirements of each product. The objective of this paper is to define a framework that allows management of requirements using Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval techniques, to structure, clean, index and find reusable functionalities according to those requirements. This framework is built in a way that allows the combination of such techniques to evaluate the best combinations for finding the correct functionalities in each SPL domain.

Classification-based Mining of Reusable Components on Software Product Lines

Software Product Lines and Component-based systems can be combined to maximize reuse in a predictable and opportunistic manner. When a product line is built for a certain subdomain within a more generic domain, future needs from a closely subdomain may be fulfilled by mining the lines internal components to build a new product line. In this work, we present an approach to classify internal and external (third party) reusable components into a repository, by applying a K-Nearest Neighbors strategy, as a support for building new product lines. Natural language techniques and the WordNet lexical database are also used to process information from software components. We validate the approach with an experiment based in a dataset of external third-party components and reusable components from a product line that we built in the geographic subdomain of marine ecology.