International audienceReusing and composing pieces of software is a common practice in software engineering. However, reusing the user interfaces that come with software systems is still an ongoing work. The Alias framework helps developers to reuse and compose user interfaces according to the way they are composing new systems from smaller units as a mean of speeding up the design process. In this paper we describe how we rely on Model Driven Engineering to operationalize our composition process

No abstract

Visualization systems such as dashboards are commonly used to analyze data and support users in their decision making, in communities as different as medical care, transport and software engineering. The increasing amount of data produced and continuous development of new visualizations exacerbate the difficulty of designing such dashboards, while the visualization need is broaden to specialist and non-specialist final users. In this context, we offer a multiuser approach, based on Model Driven Engineering (MDE). The idea is for the designer to express the visualization need by characterization, according to a given taxonomy. We provide a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to design the system and a Software Product Line (SPL) to capture the technological variability of visualization widgets. We performed a user study, using a software project management use case, to validate if dashboard users and designers are able to use a taxonomy to express their visualization need.

The emergence of mashups made the reuse of applications easier by providing a simple solution to juxtapose applications. However, the resulting composite applications do not allow sharing data or create complex workflows. The only current way to do so is by composing applications at the functional level to create new services. Furthermore, user interfaces must be redesigned and regenerated in order to provide an interaction between user and this new service.This paper proposes a solution to this problem. The implemented approach enables to reuse user interfaces while composing services. This composition relies on a process that first abstracts the applications to be composed and the functional composition. Then, it achieves to a composition at the abstract level regenerating a concrete user interface in a target language. Also, thanks to a mixed-initiative composition framework, the several identified composition conflicts are then solved, either automatically or by a developer.

Many large-scale software systems intensively implement variability to reuse software and speed up development. Such mechanisms, however, bring additional complexity, which eventually leads to technical debt, threatening the software quality, and hampering maintenance and evolution. This is especially the case for variability-rich object-oriented (OO) systems that implement variability in a single codebase. They heavily rely on existing OO mechanisms to implement their variability, making them especially prone to variability debt at the code level. In this paper, we propose Vari-Metrics, an extension of a visualization relying on the city metaphor to reveal such zones of indebted OO variability implementations. VariMetrics extends the VariCity visualization and displays standard OO quality metrics, such as code duplication, code complexity, or test coverage, as additional visual properties on the buildings representing classes. Extended configuration options allow the user to choose and combine quality metrics, uncovering the critical zones of OO variability implementations. We evaluate VariMetrics both by reporting on the exposed quality-critical zones found on multiple large open-source projects, and by correcting the reported issues in such zones of one project, showing an improvement in quality. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software product lines; Software reverse engineering; Object oriented architectures; • Human-centered computing → Visualization systems and tools.