Model-driven derivation of product architectures

Abstract

Product Derivation is one of the central activities in Software Product Lines (SPL). One of the main challenges of the process of product derivation is dealing with complexity, which is caused by the large number of artifacts and dependencies between them. Another major challenge is maximizing development efficiency and reducing time-to-market, while at the same time producing high quality products. One approach to overcome these challenges is to automate the derivation process. To this end, this paper focuses on one particular activity of the derivation process; the derivation of the product-specific architecture and describes how this activity can be automated using a model-driven approach. The approach derives the product-specific architecture by selectively copying elements from the product-line architecture. The decision, which elements are included in the derived architecture, is based on a product-specific feature configuration. We present a prototype that implements the derivation as a model transformation described in the Atlas Transformation Language (ATL). We conclude with a short overview of related work and directions for future research.

VML* – A Family of Languages for Variability Management in Software Product Lines

“…These relationships can be expressed using general purpose model transformation languages, such as demonstrated in [10][11]. Nevertheless, as previously discussed in [10], these have the following shortcomings: -Metamodel Burden.…”

“…Ziadi et al [10] and Botterweck et al [11] both propose the implementation of product derivation processes as model transformations. Their proposal relies on the realization of product derivations via a model transformation language.…”

“…Due to its relevance, this topic is currently an area of intensive research and a number of approaches have been proposed [5][6][7][8][9]. Initial research focused on using general-purpose model transformations to encode product derivation [10][11]. Later it was argued that this placed too heavy a burden on SPL engineers, as they would now also have to learn the intricacies of model transformations.…”

Validating a model-driven software architecture evaluation and improvement method: A family of experiments

“…Various studies concerned with the derivation (e.g., [14], [61]) and/or evaluation of software architectures from several points of view (e.g., [65], [37], [70], [66]) have been proposed in literature. After reviewing these studies, we have observed that: (a) There is a lack of systematic methods that model the impact between architectural design decisions and quality attributes to support the integrated derivation, evaluation and quality enhancement of software architectures.…”

Defining and Validating a Multimodel Approach for Product Architecture Derivation and Improvement

“…Although several methods for architecture derivation and improvement in SPL development have been proposed over the last few years (e.g., [23], [28], [19], [31], [6], [8], [29]), there is still a need for approaches that model the impact between architectural design decisions and quality attributes and use this information to enhance the quality attribute levels of product architectures. We have addressed this problem, in previous works [17] [18] [20], by proposing an approach with which to ensure the desired quality attribute levels for a product by applying architectural transformations to a product architecture derived from a product line architecture using a multimodel.…”