Evolution in Software Product Lines: Defining and Modelling for Management

Abstract

Evolution in Software Product Line (SPL) is claimed when there are changes in the requirements, product structure or the technology being used. Currently, many different approaches have been proposed on how to manage SPL assets and some also address how evolution affects these assets. However, the usefulness, effectiveness and applicability of these approaches are unclear, as there is no clear consensus on what an asset is. In this work, we plan to reduce complexity in SPL evolution management. For this goal, the difficulty is defining and modeling SPL evolution and we expect to propose a flexible way to manage it. However, a large variety of artifacts is considered in SPL evolution studies, but feature models are by far the most researched ones. Feature models are widely used to represent SPLs and have been greatly developed in the Feature-Oriented Reuse Method (FORM). Consequently, in our previous works, after observed that this method has a loose structure since it does not provide guidance to reuse and rigorously analyze its assets, we have extended FORM to FORM/BCS (the Feature Oriented Reuse Method with Business Component Semantics) by enveloping its assets among which feature models with business component semantics. The contribution and the novelty of this work is that, by highlighting formally the concept of software asset and revisiting feature business components, to add new information when analyzing a domain, such as clashing actions. conflicts or undesired interactions between existing features in a product line and new features due to evolution of the product line can be manage in a flexible way.