Configuring use case models in product families

Abstract

In many domains such as automotive and avionics, the size and complexity of software systems is quickly increasing. At the same time, many stakeholders tend to be involved in the development of such systems, which typically must also be configured for multiple customers with varying needs. Product Line Engineering (PLE) is therefore an inevitable practice for such systems. Furthermore, because in many areas requirements must be explicit and traceability to them is required by standards, use cases and domain models are common practice for requirements elicitation and analysis. In this paper, based on the above observations, we aim at supporting PLE in the context of use casecentric development. Therefore, we propose, apply, and assess a use case-driven configuration approach which interactively receives configuration decisions from the analysts to generate Product Specific (PS) use case and domain models. Our approach provides the following: (1) a use case-centric product line modeling method (PUM), (2) automated, interactive configuration support based on PUM, and (3) an automatic generation of PS use case and domain models from Product Line (PL) models and configuration decisions. The approach is supported by a tool relying on Natural Language Processing (NLP), and integrated with an industrial requirements management tool, i.e., IBM Doors. We successfully applied and evaluated our approach to an industrial case study in the automotive domain, thus showing evidence that the approach is practical and beneficial to capture variability at the appropriate level of granularity and to configure PS use case and domain models in industrial settings.

Supporting change in product lines within the context of use case-driven development and testing

“…We proposed, applied, and assessed a use case-driven configuration approach based on our modeling method (PUM) [22]. The approach supports three activities.…”

PUMConf: a tool to configure product specific use case and domain models in a product line

“…PUMConf has been evaluated in an industrial context for which a case study, i.e., STO, and a questionnaire study were reported in [10]. We applied PUMConf to the functional requirements of STO.…”

“…PUMConf is the tool support of our configuration approach for use case-driven development, described in a recent research paper [10]. Figure 1 presents an overview of our tool.…”

“…PUMConf employs a consistency checking algorithm based on mapping variation points, use cases and variant dependencies to propositional logic formulas. For a given decision regarding a variation point in the PL diagram, the algorithm infers further, implicit decisions and only checks the satisfaction of the propositional formulas derived from the dependencies of the variation point [10].…”

Change Impact Analysis for Evolving Configuration Decisions in Product Line Use Case Models

“…In order to model variability in use case specifications, we introduced new product line extensions for the Restricted Use Case Modeling method (RUCM) ( Yue et al, 2013 ). We developed a use case-driven configuration approach ( Hajri et al, 2016a( Hajri et al, , 2016b ) based on PUM. Our configuration approach supports guiding stakeholders in making configuration decisions (e.g., checking consistency of a decision with prior decisions) and automatically generating PS use case models from the PL models and configuration decisions.…”