ncreasingly, software engineers spend their time creating software families consisting of similar systems with many variations. While developers are pressed to build these families, they have no effective means for doing so. They are asked to create and reuse libraries of components but find those libraries costly to build and of limited value. They search for the right decomposition of their software into modules or classes, but have limited guidance in finding those decompositions, especially in the face of constraints on performance, reliability, and ease of use. Scope, commonality, and variability (SCV) analysis gives software engineers a systematic way of thinking about and identifying the product family they are creating. Among other things, it helps developers ♦ create a design that contributes to reuse and ease of change, ♦ predict how a design might fail or succeed as it evolves, and ♦ identify opportunities for automating the creation of family members.

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Concurrent programs are hard to test due to the inherent nondeterminism. This paper presents a method and tool support for testing concurrent Java components. Tool support is offered through ConAn (Concurrency Analyser), a tool for generating drivers for unit testing Java classes that are used in a multithreaded context. To obtain adequate controllability over the interactions between Java threads, the generated driver contains threads that are synchronized by a clock. The driver automatically executes the calls in the test sequence in the prescribed order and compares the outputs against the expected outputs specified in the test sequence. The method and tool are illustrated in detail on an asymmetric producer-consumer monitor. Their application to testing over 20 concurrent components, a number of which are sourced from industry and were found to contain faults, is presented and discussed.

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A software product line is a family of products that share common features to meet the needs of a market area. Systematic processes have been developed to dramatically reduce the cost of a product line. Such product-line engineering processes have proven practical and effective in industrial use, but are not widely understood. The Family-Oriented Abstraction, Specification and Translation (FAST) process has been used successfully at Lucent Technologies in over 25 domains, providing productivity improvements of as much as four to one. In this paper, we show how to use FAST to document precisely the key abstractions in a domain, exploit design patterns in a generic product-line architecture, generate documentation and Java code, and automate testing to reduce costs. The paper is based on a detailed case study covering all aspects from domain analysis through testing.