A Comparative Study of Compositional and Annotative Modelling Approaches for Software Process Lines

Aleixo, Fellipe Araújo; Freire, Marília; Alencar, D. S. M.; Campos, Edmilson; Kulesza, Uir'

doi:10.1109/sbes.2012.11

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…This section presents how traces are transformed into a well-formed formula of the propositional logic. These types of formulas are often used when generating a product from the SPL, mainly when using a preprocessing approach [6,7]. In such a case, the formula is formed by first considering a feature as an atomic proposition.…”

Section: Traces Transformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveraging relational concept analysis for automated feature location in software product lines

Hlad

Lemoine

Huchard

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences

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Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) has been introduced for almost a decade as a suitable method for Feature Location (FL) on a collection of product variants. Even though FCA-based FL techniques allow to locate the core of a feature implementation, they do not propose a solution to trace feature interactions to their implementation. Thus, the extracted traceability links (traces) are too inaccurate, and, in the context of SPL extraction, cannot be used to generate complete products. In this paper, we propose to complement the FCA-based FL techniques by leveraging the power of Relational Concept Analysis, an extension of FCA to multi-relational data. From two given formal contexts, one for the product's artefact and one for their features, our technique computes the traces that link the features and the feature interactions to their corresponding artefacts. Additionally, we introduce a stage that removes unnecessary features from the extracted traces, to make them easier to understand by an expert. Our FL technique can be applied at any artefact granularity (from files to statements) and independently from software languages. The results show that our technique produces valid traces, from which we were able to completely rebuild the set of artefacts for each initial product. Moreover, they show that our trace reduction removes, on average, between 31% and 85% of unnecessary features from the traces. Keywords feature location • software product variants • software product lines • formal concept analysis • relational concept analysis * Citation: Hlad et al. Leveraging Relational Concept Analysis for Automated Feature Location in Software Product Lines.

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Section: Traces Transformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveraging relational concept analysis for automated feature location in software product lines

Hlad

Lemoine

Huchard

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences

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“…Aleixo et al [4] compare both mechanism types in the context of Software Process Line engineering, i.e., applying concepts and tools from SPL engineering to software processes. They compare two established tools: EPF Composer, which uses a compositional mechanism, and GenArch-P, which uses an annotative one.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variability representations in class models

Strüber

Anjorin

Berger

2020

Proceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems

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Owing to the ever-growing need for customization, software systems often exist in many different variants. To avoid the need to maintain many different copies of the same model, developers of modeling languages and tools have recently started to provide representations for such variant-rich systems, notably variability mechanisms that support the implementation of differences between model variants. Available mechanisms either follow the annotative or the compositional paradigm, each of them having unique benefits and drawbacks. Language and tool designers select the used variability mechanism often solely based on intuition. A better empirical understanding of the comprehension of variability mechanisms would help them in improving support for effective modeling.In this paper, we present an empirical assessment of annotative and compositional variability mechanisms for class models. We report and discuss findings from an experiment with 73 participants, in which we studied the impact of two selected variability mechanisms during model comprehension tasks. We find that, compared to the baseline of listing all model variants separately, the annotative technique did not affect developer performance. Use of the compositional mechanism correlated with impaired performance. For two out of three considered tasks, the annotative mechanism is preferred to the compositional one and the baseline. We present actionable recommendations concerning support of flexible, tasksspecific solutions, and the transfer of established best practices from the code domain to models. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Model-driven software engineering; Software product lines.

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“…The steps that the process engineer will have to take are: 1 -When beginning a new project, analyze its characteristic; 2 -Select the variability from the process line; 3 -Generate a process instance from the line and selected variability. This step applies the EPF tool [20] and GenArch-P [21]; 4 -Convert the process instance to BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and configure the flow to execute the process. This conversion is made using a developed tool that makes the conversion from the EPF (UMA -Unified Method Architecture) to BPMN 2.0; 5 -Execute BPMN 2.0 with BPM Activiti platform, but due to the standardization many different BPM compatible platforms can be used.…”

Section: Core Model Definitionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A software process line for service-oriented applications

Garcia

Paludo

Malucelli

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

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The management of processes and systems is a complex and timeconsuming activity for organizations and also an ongoing Information Technology (IT) challenge. Among the different approaches for bringing flexibility to the business processes and systems are Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM). The SOA approach has become popular providing services and interfaces, enabling integration of heterogeneous and distributed platforms and BPM leverages the cycles of improvements, control and evaluation of business processes. BPM and SOA should work together aiming at improving business processes and evolving systems architecture. One main problem to apply BPM and SOA is the lack of established processes and this work proposes a software process line in order to simplify variability control and enable the instantiation of new development process applying BPM and SOA. It also aims at developing an environment to support the proposed software process line in order to automate the process, integrating industrial tools with one specifically developed to perform the transformation of UMA models into BPM notation. The main contribution of this work is the definition of the software process line for engineering service-oriented products. It is highly relevant to software industry since software process lines lacks experiments, practices and tools.

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A Comparative Study of Compositional and Annotative Modelling Approaches for Software Process Lines

Cited by 12 publications

References 10 publications

Leveraging relational concept analysis for automated feature location in software product lines

Leveraging relational concept analysis for automated feature location in software product lines

Variability representations in class models

A software process line for service-oriented applications

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