Technology for application family creation based on domain analysis

Abstract

Abstract. The theme of code reuse in software development is still important. Sometimes it is hard to find out what exactly we need to reuse in isolation of context. However, there is an opportunity to narrow the context problem, if applications in one given domain are considered. Same features in different applications in one domain have the same context respectively so the common part must be reused. Hence, the problem of domain analysis arises. On the other hand, there is metaCASE-techonology that allows to generate code of an application using diagrams, which describe this application. The main objective of this article is to present the technology for application family creation which connects the metaCASE-techonology and results of domain analysis activity. We propose to use some ideas of FODA (feature-oriented domain analysis) approach for domain analysis and use feature diagrams for describing of variability in a domain. Then we suggest to generate metamodel of the domain-specific visual language, based on feature diagram. After that based on generated metamodel domain-specific visual language editor is generated with the aid of metaCASE-tool. With this language user can connect and configure existing feature implementations thus producing an application. This technology supposed to be especially useful for software product lines.