Software Product Lines

Krishna Anusha, Eturi

Introduction:

• A software product line is a set of software systems developed by a company that share a common set of core requirements necessary for the developing a product with some known or allowable variations.

What is SPL?

• It is the process of developing related systems from common assets or common assets [2].

• Core assets :• The core assets include the architecture, reusable

components, documentations, process descriptions etc [1].

Activities in the SPL:

• Core Asset Development,• Product Development,• Management.

Fig.1 Three activities of SPL

Core Asset Development:

• It includes the development of production capability by taking inputs and resulting outputs accordingly.

• The inputs and outputs are affected by each other as this process is iterative.

Fig 2. Core Asset Development

The inputs of the core assets development are:

• Product constraints,• Styles, patterns, frameworks,• Production constraints,• Production strategy,• Inventory of preexisting assets.

The outputs of core assets development are:

• Core assets,• Product line scope,• Production plan.

Product Development:

• In the product development, the inputs include the requirements, product line scope and the core assets [5].

• The output is the product itself.

Fig 3. Production Development

Management:

The management includes two levels. They are:

The organizational level andThe technical level.

Fig 4. Management

Software Product Line practice areas:

A practice area is the body of work or set of activities.

Some of the practice areas defined for the product line concepts such as:

• Software engineering practices area,• Organizational or Technical management.

Software engineering practice areas include the following:

• Architecture definition, • Requirements engineering,• Testing,• Understanding relevant domains etc.

Technical management practice areas includes the following:

• Process definition,• Technical risk management,• Tool support etc.

The Organizational management practice areas include:

• Funding,• Market analysis,• Organizational planning,• Training etc.

What are Product Line patterns:

The patterns include ways to define similar contexts and problem/solution pairs.

The practice areas are put into practices using the product line patterns [1].

Advantages of Software Product Line:

• Achieve productivity gains,• Improve time to market,• Exploit economies of scope through reuse of

common assets [4],• Enhance the predictability of software

development processes,• Improve software quality.

Conclusion: Future directions of Software Product Line

are:• The future directions of the Software Product Line

is heading towards development of more strategic methods.

• Minimizing the short comes of the first generation methodologies, which used manual application engineering. This way, the dynamic software product lines are being developed [6].

The software mass customization is one of the development methodologies which focus on domain engineering of reusable assets [3].

References:

[1] L. M. Northrop,” SEI’s Software Product Line Tenets”, IEEE Software, Vol. 19, I. 4, P. 32-40, 2002.

[2] P. Donohoe, "Introduction to Software Product Lines", 12th International Software Product Line Conference, P.370 - 370, 2008.

[3] C. W. K. Krueger, “New methods in Software Product Line Development”, 10th International Software Product Line conference, 2006.

[4] C.W.Krueger,"Software product line reuse in practice",3rd IEEE Symposium on Application-Specific Systems and Software Engineering Technology, Proceedings, P.117 - 118, 2000.

[5] J. Zhang, X. Cai, G. Liu, "The Role of Aspects in Software Product Lines", International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology, P. 588-592, 2008.

References contd..

[6] M. Kim, S. Park, “Goal and Scenario Driven Product Line

Development”, IEEE Computer Society, 2004.

Questions?

Thank you