Incremental Reconfiguration of Product Specific Use Case Models for Evolving Configuration Decisions

Abstract

Abstract. [Context and motivation]Product Line Engineering (PLE) is increasingly common practice in industry to develop complex systems for multiple customers with varying needs. In many business contexts, use cases are central development artifacts for requirements engineering and system testing. In such contexts, use case configurators can play a significant role to capture variable and common requirements in Product Line (PL) use case models and to generate Product Specific (PS) use case models for each new customer in a product family. [Question/Problem] Although considerable research has been devoted to use case configurators, little attention has been paid to supporting the incremental reconfiguration of use case models with evolving configuration decisions.[Principal ideas/results] We propose, apply, and assess an incremental reconfiguration approach to support evolving configuration decisions in PL use case models. PS use case models are incrementally reconfigured by focusing only on the changed decisions and their side effects. In our prior work, we proposed and applied Product line Use case modeling Method (PUM) to support variability modeling in PL use case diagrams and specifications. We also developed a use case configurator, PUMConf, which interactively collects configuration decisions from analysts to generate PS use case models from PL models. Our approach is built on top of PUM and PUMConf.[Contributions] We provide fully automated tool support for incremental configuration as an extension of PUMConf. Our approach has been evaluated in an industrial case study in the automotive domain, which provided evidence it is practical and beneficial.

Change Impact Analysis for Evolving Configuration Decisions in Product Line Use Case Models

“…This paper is an extension of our work published in REFSQ 2017 ( Hajri et al, 2017b ). The published work reported on the incremental reconfiguration of PS use case models.…”

Automating system test case classification and prioritization for use case-driven testing in product lines

“…4). The first three steps are executed for each of the n previous products in the product line, where each one has a decision model M i with i = 1 ..n. Note that we also employ the first two steps of the pipeline in our previous work [37,38]. In Step 1, Matching decision model elements, our approach automatically executes the structural differencing of M i and M new by looking for corresponding model elements representing decisions for the same variations (see Section 5.1).…”

“…For the first two pipeline steps in Fig. 4, we rely on a model matching and change calculation algorithm we devised in our prior work [37,38]. In this section, we provide a brief overview of the two steps and their output for the example decision models in Fig.…”

Automating System Test Case Classification and Prioritization for Use Case-Driven Testing in Product Lines

“…For the first two pipeline steps in Fig. 6, we rely on a model matching and change calculation algorithm we devised in our prior work [38] [39]. In this section, we provide a brief overview of the two steps and their output for the example decision models in Fig.…”