An SOA approach for automating software product line adoption

Abstract

Nowadays, the software industry is faced with challenges regarding complexity, time to market, quality standards and evolution. To face those challenges, two strategies that are gaining interest both in academy and industry are Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software Product Lines (SPL). While SOA aims at building applications from an orchestration of services, SPL consists in building a set of coreassets and a derivation strategy based on such assets. Adopting such approaches involves important challenges with regard to existing software artifacts that must be transformed in order to respect an architecture that focus on modularity and reuse. This paper presents an industrial experience of such transformation. We propose a non-intrusive reverse engineering process for the development of modular services obtained automatically from existing software artifacts, and a variability-driven derivation process to assembly products out of such services. To validate our approach, we have implemented the reverse engineering and derivation processes using real software JEE artifacts from a component framework of reusable functionalities in several different enterprise applications. The results show important benefits in terms of the development time and flexibility.

Extractive SPL adoption applied into a small software company

“…The authors describe the analysis of the 4 http://splc.net/fame.html domain and the application engineering processes. Parra et al [6] describe the implementation of SPLs in Heinsohn Business Technology. They developed a SOA modular architecture to support the adoption of a SPL over a set of JEE artifacts already developed for different domain applications.…”

“…The domain engineering process is executed once in order to construct the 1 http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/start/glossary/index.cfm product-line infrastructure, whereas the application engineering phase is executed each time a new product is derived from the product line. SPLE has been applied in several domains, especially in large-scale software development [1]- [6], but it also has increasingly garnered interest from small to medium-sized companies. Motivated by those experiences our general goal is to apply the related concepts of software product line engineering to Acople Tecnológico SAS, a small Colombian enterprise specializing in software development.…”

Service oriented product lines - managed service level agreements for better quality of service

“…Therefore, instead of developing everything from scratch, it could be better to reuse some assets to fit specific customer needs that are common across the application. Software Product Line (SPL) is playing a crucial role of preparing core assets and making them more reusable by defining with identified Today, with the increasing complexity and size of software, maintenance and reusability has become a challenging task [1]. Moreover, flexibility plays an important role for such challenges and SOA delivers valuable aspects of components based flexibility and reusability.…”