Engineering Languages for Specifying Product-Derivation Processes in Software Product Lines

Abstract

Abstract. The goal of a Software Product Line (SPL) is to provide a set of reusable software assets for the rapid production of a software systems family aimed at a specific market segment. The main objective of SPL engineering is to construct, as automatically as possible, specific products after selecting the particular set of features that must be included in them. Unlike traditional engineering of single systems, SPL engineering often requires dealing with three different languages at each stage of the software lifecycle: (1) a language for specifying the variability of the SPL (e.g. a feature model); (2) a language for designing the reusable software assets (e.g. UML 2.0); and (3) a language that specifies how these reusable assets must be composed for constructing specific products. There are currently available enough languages for variability specification and software assets design, but there is a general lack of languages for specifying and automating the composition of these assets. This paper presents as a novel contribution a process to engineer this kind of language. The process produces an editor and a "compiler", which automates the composition of reusable assets, for a particular language. To explain this process a language has been developed to compose reusable assets of architectural models.

VML* – A Family of Languages for Variability Management in Software Product Lines

“…To make development of such languages feasible, this paper proposes VML* 2 The key contribution of this paper is, thus, in the domain of software-language engineering, where it applies ideas from SPLE and model-driven development to the development of VML* languages. This enables us to efficiently build new VML* languages for new SPL contexts, and thus improves over our previous work [12], which was limited to copy-and-paste-based reuse, limiting efficiency and increasing error-proneness of language development. A secondary contribution is that this new approach to language development allows us to support additional evaluations for VML* languages, such as generation of trace links or SPL consistency checking.…”

“…As a result, software product line engineers are forced to rely on abstractions that might not be naturally part of the abstraction level at which they are working. To overcome these shortcomings, we proposed [12] to create dedicated languages, for specifying product derivation processes; that is, for specifying how features map to software models. These dedicated languages must follow a very basic computation style, where based on a selection of features, small sequence of simple commands are executed.…”

“…3. A generator-based infrastructure that can instantiate all custom elements of the process from [12] for any VML* language. A working prototype of this system is available as a set of Eclipse plugins [22].…”

“…Later it was argued that this placed too heavy a burden on SPL engineers, as they would now also have to learn the intricacies of model transformations. Consequently, a number of approaches that hide the model transformations from the SPL engineers have recently been developed [6][7]12].…”

“…In contrast, we have argued before [12] [13] that transformation actions that are specific to the types of models used for describing the SPL are more useful, as they provide a terminology already known to SPL engineers, allow consideration of model semantics in the definition of transformations, and allow avoiding some inconsistencies (e.g., dangling references) in product models by design.…”