Light-weight tool support for staged product derivation

Abstract

Tool support that checks for configuration errors and generates product parts from configurations can significantly improve on product derivation in product line engineering. Up to now, however, derivation tools commonly disregard the staged derivation process. They do not restrict configuration consistency checks to process entities such as configuration stages, stakeholders, or build tasks. As a result, constraints that are only valid for certain process entities must either be checked permanently, leading to false positive errors, or one must refrain from defining them at all. This paper contributes a light-weight approach to provide tailored tool support for staged product derivation. Compared to previous approaches, it is not tied to a single configuration mechanism (e.g., feature modeling), and also accounts for the stakeholders involved and the build tasks that generate product parts. First, the product line engineer describes the derivation process in a concise model. Then, based on constraint checks on the configuration (e.g., a feature model configuration) that are linked to the modeled entities, comprehensive tool support can be provided: Configuration actions can be guided and restricted depending on the configuring stakeholder in a fine-grained manner, and constraints attached to a build task will only be checked if it actually shall be executed. Finally, in combination with previous work, the paper provides evidence that the approach is applicable to legacy product lines in a light-weight manner and that it technically scales to thousands of constraint checks.