An Integrated Cost Model for Product Line Engineering

Today, we will publish in this blog one more M.Sc. dissertation defended in our group.

Jarley Nobrega's dissertation presents a relevant contribution for the field defining an economic model for software product lines.

Here is the abstract of the work:

In the software development community, the process of using existing artifacts rather than building them from scratch – generally known as software reuse – has been advanced as a way in which the problems associated with cost and schedule overruns can be avoided. Despite the potential rewards from an effective reuse program, it appears that its large-scale adoption is not particularly prevalent. Among the factors that inhibit reuse adoption there are the economic obstacles faced by organizations, which are concerned with the cost related to develop software for reuse and with reuse. Currently, thedecisions concerning large-scale reuse are often related with an economic viewpoint, since the development of software to be reusable can be considered as an investment. Moreover, the adoption of a software product line in a reuse context comes up with some inhibitors, such as the application of cost models in a restricted way, the lack of an investment analysis strategy, and the fact that a few cost models have a reuse scenario-based approach.

In this context, this work presents an integrated cost model for product line engineering in order to help the decisions concerning reuse investment. The foundations of the model were based on an extensive survey on cost models for software reuse and its extension to the product line approach. The model presents the definition of a set of cost and benefits functions, the description of reuse scenarios for product line engineering, and an investment analysis strategy. In addition, a simulation model based on the Monte Carlo method was proposed for simulating the reuse scenarios.

Finally, this work discusses the results of a case study in the context of a real software development environment where the model was applied.

See the full document here.

Second European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) 2008

From september 29th to october 1st, the Second European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) was helded in Paphos, Cyprus. The event had 37 presentation followed by poster sections where the research papers. The papers from the conference were divided in several sections. The RiSE Labs was there with the paper titled "Evaluating Domain Design Approaches Using Systematic Review" from Ednaldo Dilorenzo de Souza Filho, Ricardo de Oliveira Cavalcanti1 Danuza F. S. Neiva, Thiago H. B. Oliveira, Liana Barachisio Lisboa, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, and Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira ,in the architecture evaluation section. I presented the paper representing the authors.

The conference shown us the emerging subjects in software architecture. Among them, many interesting articles presented work about aspect orientation in architecture specification. Another discussed area was the documentation of architecture design desicions, that is a topic related with all another areas in software architecture. Software product lines was presented in a significant number of presentations, specificaly in the evaluation and documentation area. What show us that is a still growing topic.

The conference had an interesting format, with the poster section, where the short papers were discussed deeply. They were extremely necessary for a good undertanding of the subjects presented by their authors. As the keynotes we had Colin Atkinson talking about the verification of software architecture by self testing components.