Systematic quality trade-off support in the software product-line configuration process

Abstract

Software product line engineering is a compelling methodology that accomplishes systematic reuse in families of systems by relying on two key principles: (i) the decomposition of complex systems into composable and reusable building blocks (often logical units called features), and (ii) on-demand construction of products and product variants by composing these building blocks. However, unless the stakeholder responsible for product configuration has detailed knowledge of the technical ins and outs of the software product line (e.g., the architectural impact of a specific feature, or potential feature interactions), he is in many cases flying in the dark. Although many initial approaches and techniques have been proposed that take into account quality considerations and involve trade-off decisions during product configuration, no systematic support exists. In this paper, we present a reference architecture for product configuration tooling, providing support for (i) up-front generation of variants, and (ii) quality analysis of these variants. This allows pro-actively assessing and predicting architectural quality properties for each product variant and in turn, product configuration tools can take into account architectural considerations. In addition, we provide an indepth discussion of techniques and tactics for dealing with the problem of variant explosion, and as such to maintain practical feasibility of such approaches. We validated and implemented our reference architecture in the context of a real-world industrial application, a productline for the firmware of an automotive sensor. Our prototype, based on FeatureIDE, is open for extension and readily available. CCS Concepts •Software and its engineering → Software configuration management and version control systems; Software design tradeoffs;

Towards systematically addressing security variability in software product lines

“…In previous work, we developed a reference approach for providing selection support for the safety engineer in making trade-off decisions [11,13]. We offered external and internal variability models for configuring the safety solution for an automotive Hall-Effect sensor and provided tactics to counter the problem of variant explosion.…”

“…We will apply demand-driven, applied research to realize the approach. More specifically, we will test and validate the ideas and approaches in industry cases, as we did in the context of safety [11], and solve the problems encountered in those specific contexts. In the end, we aspire to generalize those solutions or reach conclusions regarding the difficulties in generalizing for security.…”

Threat and Risk Management Framework for eHealth IoT Applications

“…There were some attempts to cover architectural trade-offs and variant explosions (e.g. [27]), but security and privacy parts were missing. In general, the main shortcomings of the existing state of the art are:…”