Tooling support for variability and architectural patterns in systems engineering

Degueule, Thomas; Filho, João Bosco Ferreira; Barais, Olivier; Acher, Mathieu; Noir, Jérôme Le; Madelénat, Sébastien; Gailliard, Gregory; Burlot, Godefroy; Constant, Olivier

doi:10.1145/2791060.2791097

Cited by 7 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 12 publications

(9 reference statements)

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“…Filters are chained in a linked list and therefore provide the main abstraction, realizing modularity, pluggability and extensibility. We rely on these properties to generate specific variants, more specifically using KCVL [7] which is a set of derivation tools created around an implementation of the Common Variability Language (CVL).…”

Section: Variant Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Sion

Landuyt

Joosen

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

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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;

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Section: Variant Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Architectural patterns: In addition, we employ architectural pattern instantiation technology [7] to apply specific architectural safety patterns (e.g., the watchdog pattern) in an automated fashion.…”

Section: Variant Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Sion

Landuyt

Joosen

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

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“…We use a "custom" CVL derivation engine for adding and specializing the semantics of variation points in the VRM [15]. In [12], we have introduced the EMF Diff/Merge Patterns 5 Figure 1: A tool-supported approach: modeling and derivation of architectural variants with CVL and assessment with MYRIAD technology that provides conformant-by-construction deployment models thanks to the definition of a secure deployment pattern stored in our patterns catalog. We augmented CVL with new types of CVL variation points dedicated to the manipulation of patterns, and their instantiation on derived models.…”

Section: Modeling Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We have equipped the EMF Diff/Merge patterns technology with variability support so that numerous architectural variants can be automatically derived out of a base model. In [12], we showed a concrete example showing how in the variability realization model, the different roles of the secure deployment pattern are bound to concrete elements of the base model.…”

Section: Base Model and Variability Realization Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first contribution is a tool-based methodology for deriving, assessing and comparing several variants. We use the Common Variability Language (CVL) [30] and our early effort with reusable patterns [12] and custom derivation engine [15] to specify the variability in architectural models. We then integrate the CVL part to a MDCA off-the-shelf tools for evaluating and comparing variants.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A decision-making process for exploring architectural variants in systems engineering

Noir

Madelénat

Gailliard

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

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In systems engineering, practitioners shall explore numerous architectural alternatives until choosing the most adequate variant. The decision-making process is most of the time a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone activity. The exploration and justification of architectural solutions is ad-hoc and mainly consists in a series of tries and errors on the modeling assets. In this paper, we report on an industrial case study in which we apply variability modeling techniques to automate the assessment and comparison of several candidate architectures (variants). We first describe how we can use a model-based approach such as the Common Variability Language (CVL) to specify the architectural variability. We show that the selection of an architectural variant is a multi-criteria decision problem in which there are numerous interactions (veto, favor, complementary) between criteria. We present a tooled process for exploring architectural variants integrating both CVL and the MYRIAD method for assessing and comparing variants based on an explicit preference model coming from the elicitation of stakeholders' concerns. This solution allows understanding differences among variants and their satisfactions with respect to criteria. Beyond variant selection automation improvement, this experiment results highlight that the approach improves rationality in the assessment and provides decision arguments when selecting the preferred variants.

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Experience in Specializing a Generic Realization Language for SPL Engineering at Airbus

Foures,

Acher,

Barais

et al. 2023

2023 ACM/IEEE 26th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS)

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In software product line (SPL) engineering, feature models are the de facto standard for modeling variability. A user can derive products out of a base model by selecting features of interest. Doing it automatically, however, requires a realization model, which is a description of how a base model should be modified when a given feature is selected/unselected. A realization model then necessarily depends on the base metamodel, asking for ad hoc solutions that have flourished in recent years. In this paper, we propose Greal, a generic solution to this problem in the form of (1) a generic declarative realization language that can be automatically composed with one or more base metamodels to yield a domain-specific realization language and (2) a product derivation algorithm applying a realization model to a base model and a resolved model to yield a derived product. We describe how, on top of Greal, we specialized a realization language to support both positive and negative variability, fit the syntax and semantics of the targeted language (BPMN) and take into account modeling practices at Airbus. We report on lessons learned of applying this approach on Program Development Plans based on business process models and discuss open problems.

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Tooling support for variability and architectural patterns in systems engineering

Cited by 7 publications

References 12 publications

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

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

A decision-making process for exploring architectural variants in systems engineering

Experience in Specializing a Generic Realization Language for SPL Engineering at Airbus

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