In this post I'll bring some initial work from my master thesis, which will bring some contribution on Software Product Line in the Digital Television Domain. Entitled "Designing Software Product Line Architecture", this talk was presented today at the Seminars in Software Reuse course at Cin/UFPE. It shows a survey on the well known Product Line Architecture Methods, comparison of those mathods by Marinlassi, M. and a nice state-of-art work by Hendrickson, S. A. & van derHoek A..Software product line engineering is a pro-active reuse approach. It introduces software reuse in large scale, throughout the organization. Its adoption benefits from lowering costs and time-to-market as well as raising product quality.
The five best known architecting methods for Software Product lines, which were surveyed in this presentation were the FAST method, by David Weiss; FORM by Kio Kang, that focuses in the feature analysis and develops its architectural model based on its feature model; COPA, developed inside Philips, which is probably the most extense method, covering also organizational issues; the QADA method, by Matinlassi, focuses on architectural quality attributes and proposes designing and assessing the architecture; and last, but not least, the KobrA method, developd by Atkinson, inside the Fraunhofer Institute as a concrete, component-based, object-oriented instantiation of PuLSE-DSSA.
Besides the well known methods proposing a new way of modeling product line architectures, Hendrickson bases his work on change sets and relationships between those change sets. An interesting alternative for tackling complexity.
Agreeing with Matinlassi's comparison of the well known methods, the KobrA approach is the simplest one. It is very pragmatic and focuses directly on defining a conceptual architecture and realizing it through component-based development. The key activities in the KobrA approach are those related to context realization (Application Context, Framework Context...). Therefore, a worthy contribution shall come from closing this gap between the conceptual approach and the Digital TV application domain.
The slides are available here for download, already with some extensions suggested this morning, at the classroom.
1 comment:
It was a very good survey, showing some of the existing software product line architecture approaches. In my opinion the simplest approaches are the ones that make some adaptation from the existing architectural description languages like UML. KobrA, PuLSE and PLUS (not mentioned) are very good examples. This because the effort for an add-hoc software product line factory can be largely decreased. The RiDE approach is very interesting in the point that it guides the user on how to group components and how to treat variability with design patterns.
Post a Comment