Product Derivation in Software Product Lines

During application engineering concrete products are built based on the reusable assets. The idea behind the SPLE (Software Product Line Engineering) is that the investments required to develop the reusable artifacts during domain engineering, are outweighed by the benefits in deriving the individual products during application engineering [2].

Product derivation is a key activity in application engineering and addresses the selection and customization of assets from the product line [2]. According to Jhon D.McGregor [3], the Product derivation is the focus of a software product line organization and its exact form contributes heavily to the achievement of targeted goals. However, when isn’t realized through sistematic process, the software product line goal can’t be achieve, diminishing the expected gains.

Beyond the sistematic process, according to Cirilo[1], ideally the product derivation process would be accomplished with the help of instantiation tools to facilitate the selection, composition and configuration of SPL code assets and their respective variabilities.

In the product derivation context, some approaches apply model-driven development techniques; others are merely a collection of guidelines. Yet other approaches provide a high-level methodology or process framework [4]. For instance, PULSE-I process[5], Bosh Framework[6], and COVAMOF process[7].

Unfortunately, in the analysis of existing product derivation approaches showed that great part of the available product derivation approaches do not cover all the steps of application engineering, and neither define activities, sub-activities, roles, inputs and outputs of each step in a systematic way, aspects that should be considered. Moreover, the majority of them doesn't has a tool support.

[1] Cirilo, E., Nunes, I., Kulesza, U., Nunes, C., and Lucena, C. 2009. Automatic product derivation of multi-agent systems product lines. In Proceedings of the 2009 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (Honolulu, Hawaii). SAC '09. ACM, New York, NY, 731-732.

[2] Deelstra, S., Sinnema, M., and Bosch, J. 2005. Product derivation in software product families: a case study. J. Syst. Softw.74, 2 (Jan. 2005), 173-194.

[3] Deelstra, S., Sinnema, M., Bosch, J., 2003. A Product Derivation Framework for Software Product Families, accepted for the 5th Workshop on Product Family Engineering (PFE-5), November 2003.

[4] John D. Mc Gregor: "Goal-driven Product Derivation", in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 8, no. 5, July-August 2009, pp. 7-19.

[5] J. Bayer, C. Gacek, D. Muthig, T. Widen. PuLSE-I: Deriving Instances from a Product Line Infrastructure. In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference and Workshop on the Engineering of Computer-Based Systems, pages 237-245, 2000.

[6] Rabiser, R., Grünbacher, P., Dhungana, D.: Requirements for Product Derivation Support: Results from a Systematic Literature Review and an Expert Survey. Information and Software Technology, International Journal. Elsevier, 2009.

[7] Sinnema, M., Deelstra, S., Hoekstra, P., 2006b. The COVAMOF derivation process. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Software Reuse.