Shahliza Abd Halim

Requirements Identification and Representation in Software Product Line

Software Product Line (SPL) core assets development is an effective approach in software reuse in which core assets can be shared among the members of the product line with an explicit treatment of variability. Considering reuse early in development phase can promise the increase in reuse and understanding reuse at a later development phase. This paper concentrates on identifying and representing variability at requirement level. The proposed approach differs slightly from other approaches where identification of the variant requirements is done with commonality and variability analysis and using two important requirements model, feature and use case model. Relation between both requirements model is through matrix table. This paper illustrates the application of this approach using the library systems product line example.

An Approach for Representing Domain Requirements and Domain Architecture in Software Product Line

Software Product Line (SPL) core assets development is an effective approach in software reuse in which core assets can be shared among the members of the product line with an explicit treatment of variability. Among the artefacts of core asset are architecture, reusable software components, domain models, requirements statements, documentation and specifications, performance models, schedules, budgets, test plans, test cases, work plans, and process descriptions.Variability in its own right is the central concept in SPL which is not being catered by conventional method of reuse. Consequently, it is important for variability to be identified and to be represented early at requirements phase. The importance of identifying requirements variability earlier at requirements level is also known as systematic reuse by researchers (Frakes and Isoda 1994; Muthig 2002). Variability at requirements levels also initiates the existence of the variability at architecture thus further highlight the inadequacy of considering variability solely at architectural level. Therefore, considering on variability at architecture and its implementation level is not enough where the understanding of variability at the requirements level is also required (Yu, Akhihebbal et al. 1998; Moon 2005; Kircher, Schwanninger et al. 2006).

Learning environment for software product lines online learning applications

The process of learning and teaching online learning has undergone many changes in line with technological developments. Education institutions have begun introducing new methods of learning this. However, it needs a huge amount of labor intensive to produce and maintain educational technologies due to its huge size (literacy, vocational education, school education, engineering and medical education) and huge variants (language, dialect). With the growing demand and at the same time would like to reduce the factor of cost, time and effort is long, then the need for an effective solution allowing rapid system development. A Software Product Line (SPL) approach is one of the best methods that can be used to develop an educational software family. The research contributes to the development of online learning SPL by studying issues in online learning SPL, identify appropriate pedagogical approach to online learning environment that is constructivism, and designing constructivist learning environment based on the theory of constructivism and design principles. In this paper, comparison between 10 VLE was tabulated against constructivist learning environment. The comparative evaluation is to discover commonalities and variabilities between online learning applications. The results should be useful as the process of domain analysis that is to document the commonalities and variabilities between SPL members. Hence, it can be used to enhance the feature model for online learning applications.

Synthetic Experiment in Evaluating the Usability Factor of the Requirement Change Propagation Process Model

The proposed requirement change propagation ( ReChaP ) approach promotes significant supports in simplifying the tedious tasks of requirement change propagation to other software artefacts during software evolution. One of the ReChaP’s pillars is the process model, which provides systematic guidelines to simplify the phenomenally time consuming and expensive efforts of the requirement change propagation process. This paper specifically reports on the preliminary results and the observation analysis for the conducted synthetic experiment in academic settings. The experiment’s goal is to evaluate the usability quality factor of the process model in terms of five main criteria; efficiency, effectiveness, learnability, satisfaction and usefulness. Our initial findings observe that the proposed ReChaP process model is soundly demonstrated as sufficiently usable, practical enough, and meantime has ideally achieved reasonable percentages for the five comprehensive criteria of the measured usability factor.