After the derivation of specific applications from a software product line, the applications keep evolving with respect to new customer's requirements. In general, evolutions in most industrial projects are expressed using natural language, because it is the easiest and the most flexible way for customers to express their needs. However, the use of this means of communication has shown its limits in detecting defects, such as inconsistency and duplication, when evolving the existing models of the software product line. The aim of this paper is to transform the natural language specifications of new evolutions into a more formal representation using natural language processing. Then, an algorithm is proposed to automatically detect duplication between these specifications and the existing product line feature models. In order to instantiate the proposed solution, a tool is developed to automatize the two operations.
Software product line engineering is a large scale development paradigm based on mass production. It consists in building a common platform from which a set of products can be derived. Under the constraints of continuous evolution and costs optimization, the derivation process must be able to answer customers' requirements and provide adequate products in a short time without defects. However, this purpose cannot be achieved if the customer must wait for the change is implemented in the common platform. In this paper, we describe our work which proposes a framework to manage derivation of adaptable products. An adaptable product is obtained by deriving the most similar product from the common platform and changing it to support the new requirements. The aim of the framework is to give quick response to the customers need while the new requirements are being implemented in the common platform. The framework includes tools for processing natural language requirements, computing the similarity between products on the basis of their requirements, and the product adaptation effort measuring.
In this rapidly changing world, business strategies continuously evolve to meet customers' wishes. Hence, the ability to cope with the frequent business changes is becoming important criteria of a leading development paradigm. Software product line engineering is a development paradigm based on reuse that builds a common platform from which a set of applications can be derived. Despite its advantage of enhancing time to market and costs, it is exposed to the risk of falling into the aging phenomenon because of the complexity of its evolution. In this paper the authors present a co-evolution based approach for protecting the software product lines from the aging phenomenon. The approach uses cladistics and trees reconciliation that are mainly used in biology to analyze the co-evolution between organisms. The authors' major goal is to find out changes of products that were not propagated to the common platform at the aim of reconsidering them in the platform and thus protecting it from being obsolete.
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