An overview of Dynamic Software Product Line architectures and techniques: Observations from research and industry

Abstract

a b s t r a c tOver the last two decades, software product lines have been used successfully in industry for building families of systems of related products, maximizing reuse, and exploiting their variable and configurable options. In a changing world, modern software demands more and more adaptive features, many of them performed dynamically, and the requirements on the software architecture to support adaptation capabilities of systems are increasing in importance. Today, many embedded system families and application domains such as ecosystems, service-based applications, and self-adaptive systems demand runtime capabilities for flexible adaptation, reconfiguration, and post-deployment activities. However, as traditional software product line architectures fail to provide mechanisms for runtime adaptation and behavior of products, there is a shift toward designing more dynamic software architectures and building more adaptable software able to handle autonomous decision-making, according to varying conditions. Recent development approaches such as Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs) attempt to face the challenges of the dynamic conditions of such systems but the state of these solution architectures is still immature. In order to provide a more comprehensive treatment of DSPL models and their solution architectures, in this research work we provide an overview of the state of the art and current techniques that, partially, attempt to face the many challenges of runtime variability mechanisms in the context of Dynamic Software Product Lines. We also provide an integrated view of the challenges and solutions that are necessary to support runtime variability mechanisms in DSPL models and software architectures.

A Semantic Metadata Enrichment Software Ecosystem (SMESE) Based on a Multi-Platform Metadata Model for Digital Libraries

“…This has led to software product line engineering (SPLE) [24] as a comprehensive model that helps software providers to build applications for organizations/ clients based on a common architecture and core assets. SPLE deals with the assembly of products from current core assets, commonly known as components, within a component-based architecture [43] [44], and involves the continuous growth of the core assets as production proceeds.…”

“…Furthermore, as the requirement of SECO to support adaptation capabilities of systems is increasing in importance [20] it is recommended such adaptive features be included within software product lines (SPL) [21] [22] [23] [24]. The SPL concept is appealing to organizations dealing with software development that aims to provide a comprehensive model for an organization building applications based on a common architecture and core assets [20] [21].…”

An Evaluation of the Challenges of Multilingualism in Data Warehouse Development

“…In DSPLs, products can be reconfigured dynamically at runtime after their initial derivation (Bencomo et al, 2012). Although DSPLs have some differences compared with SPLs, DSPLs still share the same development life-cycle as presented by Capilla et al (Capilla et al, 2014a).…”

“…These tasks are performed in the domain engineering life-cycle, through two different activities: domain and context analysis (Capilla et al, 2014a). The domain analysis specifies the domain that the line will support, identifying and documenting the vari- (Capilla et al, 2014b).…”

“…An important activity from context analysis is to identify the information used by the products reconfiguration process that happens due to the changes in use environment. When a new context is identified, the product needs to check which features must be activated and which should not (Capilla et al, 2014a).…”