Assessing merge potential of existing engine control systems into a product line

Abstract

Engine Control Systems (ECS) for automobiles have many variants for many manufactures and several markets. To improve their development efficiency, exploiting ECS commonalities and predicting their variability are mandatory. The concept of software product line engineering meets this ECS business background. However, we should carefully investigate the expected technical, economical, and organizational effects of introducing the strategy into existing products. Thereafter, a strategy will be derived systematically and realize the desired benefits. This paper reports an experience with the up-front investigation performed for Hitachi's ECS. We focus on the approach to plan the migration of the existing family of individual systems into a future product line. The approach assesses potential ways of merging software from existing variants and eventually defines a procedure for performing the migration. To get a high quality strategy, we integrate the approach of software measurement, the expertise of software architects, and reverse engineering techniques

Managed Evolution of Automotive Software Product Line Architectures: A Systematic Literature Study

“…This section discusses studies P71 [43], P94 [48], P173 [51], and P660 [74], which were found addressing the cost/effort estimation category. A number of studies consider the cost/effort estimation a key activity, especially in the course of planning a product line development endeavor.…”

“…Yoshimura et al [48,51] address effort estimation methods with two studies: the approach proposed in [48] describes a software clone analysis approach, and the approach discussed in [51] proposes an estimation process based on the return on investment (ROI). Both approaches are integrated into a process for merge potential assessment of existing variants, i.e., how to (economically) reintegrate variants back into the product line.…”

“…This section discusses studies P94 [48], P173 [51], P221 [55], and E132 [81], which were assigned to the SPL merging category. If independently developed systems, e.g., diesel and gasoline software systems, share a high degree of common functionalities, merging those products into one product line is reasonable.…”

“…The two studies by Yoshimura et al [48,51] primarily focus on effort estimation techniques for software product line merging (as already discussed in the category cost/effort estimation, Section 4.3.3). Both studies also outline merging strategies.…”

Variability mechanisms and lessons learned in practice

“…In this paper, we have introduced our experiences in analyzing and assessing systems implemented by the mechanisms of Cloning and Conditional Compilation, and our corresponding tools are Variant Analysis [14] and VITAL [46] respectively. In both these areas, there exist several other approaches and analysis tools, such as those developed for Cloning by Yoshimura et al [43], Mende et al [29] or Rubin et al [38], and those developed for Conditional Compilation by Kästner et al [23] or by Sincero et al [40]. However, the comparison of these approaches is beyond the scope of this paper.…”