Decision support for the software product line domain engineering lifecycle

Abstract

Software product line engineering is a paradigm that advocates the reusability of software engineering assets and the rapid development of new applications for a target domain. These objectives are achieved by capturing the commonalities and variabilities between the applications of the target domain and through the development of comprehensive and variability-covering feature models. The feature models developed within the software product line development process need to cover the relevant features and aspects of the target domain. In other words, the feature models should be elaborate representations of the feature space of that domain. Given that feature models, i.e., software product line feature models, are developed mostly by domain analysts by sifting through domain documentation, corporate records and transcribed interviews, the process is a cumbersome and error-prone one. In this paper, we propose a decision support platform that assists domain analysts throughout the domain engineering lifecycle by: (1) automatically performing natural language processing tasks over domain documents and identifying important information for the domain analysts such as the features and integrity constraints that exist in the domain documents; (2) providing a collaboration platform around the domain documents such that multiple domain analysts can collaborate with each other during the process using a Wiki; (3) formulating semantic links between domain terminology with external widely used ontologies such as WordNet in order to disambiguate the terms used in domain documents; and (4) developing traceability links between the unstructured information available in the domain documents and Autom Softw Eng (2012) 19:335-377 their formal counterparts within the formal feature model representations. Results obtained from our controlled experimentations show that the decision support platform is effective in increasing the performance of the domain analysts during the domain engineering lifecycle in terms of both the coverage and accuracy measures.

Dynamic decision models for staged software product line configuration

“…However, there were mixed opinions regarding the impact of our approach in reducing the time needed to build a product configuration. This is in line with our previous finding regarding a decision support platform for the domain engineering phase [6].…”

“…This was an interesting observation for us given our previous experience. In a related work, we developed a decision support platform for the domain engineering phase of the software product line lifecycle [6]. In our experiments and through the actual tracking of the time taken to perform a domain engineering process with and without the decision support platform, we observed that the time was quite similar for both settings.…”

“…Although in our experiments in this current paper, we did not measure the time taken to perform the tasks, due to a lack of comparison benchmark, the opinions expressed by the participants regarding the impact of the tool on time taken to complete the task resembles our previous observation that no significant impact can be observed. We think that it is possible to conclude that the use of decision support platforms, such as the one developed in this current paper and also our earlier work for the domain engineering phase [6], does not necessarily reduce the time associated with performing the task but it does certainly impact and improve the quality of the artifacts that are developed as a result.…”

“…There have already been several interesting work that provide supportive mechanisms and tools for product line designers during the domain engineering phase [6,7]. Our focus in this paper is to facilitate the application engineering phase by delivering capabilities to effectively communicate with the stakeholders and understand their needs and preferences.…”

Automated extraction of product comparison matrices from informal product descriptions

“…Numerous techniques have been developed to mine variability [10,15,16] and support domain analysis [17,18,19,20,7,6,3,21,22,23], but none of them address the problem of structuring the information in a PCM.…”