Scalable Prediction of Non-functional Properties in Software Product Lines

Abstract

Abstract-A software product line is a family of related software products, typically, generated from a set of common assets. Users can select features to derive a product that fulfills their needs. Often, users expect a product to have specific nonfunctional properties, such as a small footprint or a minimum response time. Because a product line can contain millions of products, it is usually not feasible to generate and measure nonfunctional properties for each possible product of a product line. Hence, we propose an approach to predict a product's nonfunctional properties, based on the product's feature selection. To this end, we generate and measure a small set of products, and by comparing the measurements, we approximate each feature's non-functional properties. By aggregating the approximations of selected features, we predict the product's properties. Our technique is independent of the implementation approach and language. We show how already little domain knowledge can improve predictions and discuss trade-offs regarding accuracy and the required number of measurements. Although our approach is in general applicable for quantifiable non-functional properties, we evaluate it for the non-functional property footprint. With nine case studies, we demonstrate that our approach usually predicts the footprint with an accuracy of 98 % and an accuracy of over 99 % if feature interactions are known.

Validating a model-driven software architecture evaluation and improvement method: A family of experiments

“…5(b)). The method relies on analyzing the derived product architectural models instead of relying on a set of predicted values, based on a previous measurement process of a sample of products as in [65], [37], [70]. Those approaches could have scalability concerns, due to the exponential growth of the number of configurations as a function of the number of features and they also fail on managing those products that refine or extend the NFRs of the product line with delta requirements specific for the product under development.…”

“…Various studies concerned with the derivation (e.g., [14], [61]) and/or evaluation of software architectures from several points of view (e.g., [65], [37], [70], [66]) have been proposed in literature. After reviewing these studies, we have observed that: (a) There is a lack of systematic methods that model the impact between architectural design decisions and quality attributes to support the integrated derivation, evaluation and quality enhancement of software architectures.…”

Leveraging feature models to configure virtual appliances

“…The tomcat6 package appears to be quite heavy but looking in depth, tomcat6 depends on the openjdk-6-jre-headless package (minimal OpenJDK Java runtime) that is about 100MB and that is shared with all Java-based application (e.g., Eclipse, whose total footprint -without required and important packages -is estimated at about 424MB). Besides, a recent work [17] showed that crosscutting features can significantly influence the footprint of many other features (i.e., several packages can share dependencies to the same package that only has to be installed once to resolve all dependencies, thus reducing the total footprint). Such a configuration can be seen as a way to configure a PaaSà la carte and can easily be extended to other functionalities (e.g., adding a database server such as MySQL to provide database support).…”

Towards modular analysis of multi product lines

“…Second, we need efficient techniques for verification avoiding the redundant verification of reused SPLs. Finally, at the level of non-functional properties, developers can estimate the influence of an SPL's features on different non-functional properties, such as performance, memory consumption, and footprint [10]. Considering the huge variant space, this quantification is already challenging, but when it comes to MPLs, we face additional problems regarding interactions between features belonging to different SPLs.…”