Software Product Line Design

In this post I will bring topics about my master thesis presented (see) in Seminars in Software Reuse course at Cin/UFPE. The title is "An approach to software product line Design" where I brought an evaluation of existing Software Product Line (SPL) Design approaches for discussion.

Nowadays software reuse is very important for every software company mainly because it reduces software construction effort and consequently the time to market. SPL is an approach that has being adopted for organizations to address the software reuse issue. The Main objective of SPL is to organize the common assets from a software application domain and instantiate a new application based on these assets including just specific ones from the application. An important point to address in SPL is the variability and commonality from domain. This make possible the mass customization what bring to SPL configuration mechanisms to address specific client needs from the software application.

The focus of my work is on the Domain Design subprocess from the Software Product Line Process in Mobile Game domain. The motivation for the work is the lack of works in academy addressing this issue and the need of the industry to have a process where they can reuse the maximum number of possible assets and address the difficult task of porting the same game on different platforms and models. It was evaluated the FAST process developed by David Weiss at Lucent Technologies Lab. The FAST process focus on variability in a family of products to the telecommunication infrastructure and real-time systems domain, using a commonality analysis as the entrance for design and an architectural modeling language (AML) for specifying family members. After the FAST process guides to design the family and mapping between the AML and the family design. Another presented method was the QUASAR developed by Jan Bosch at Technical Research Center of Finland. QUASAR method focus on the quality of architecture and have two phases: Design and analysis. CoPAM approach is used for sharing knowledge between domains in a company with commonality layers. This brings an increase in reuse, since there is a mix of domains in the sense of commonality. Hassan Gomaa developed the PLUS method that is compatible with the Rational Unified Process (RUP) focusing on the domain architecture with the design of components. The RiSE process for Domain Engineering (RiDE) was developed by Eduado Almeida with the purpose of addressing a general domain. The RiDE process design method has steps where the architect should decompose the modules, define the architectural and design patterns of the domain and structure use cases in components.

It was presented a draft approach based on the CoPAM approach for reuse the major part of the available assets in the game architecture domain architecture reference.

Ednaldo Dilorenzo