The Rise and Fall of Product Line Architectures

During the 14 International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC), I was co-organizing a panel with Isabel John and Christa Schwanninger about the The Rise and Fall of Product Line Architectures.

The panel had the goldfish bowl format and had as panelists the main experts in the field: Paul Clements, Charles W. Krueger, John McGregor, Dirk Muthig, and David Weiss.

The panel discussed issues as: How do you think a good product line architecture should look like? How much up-front design do we need for a product line architecture? What are hot research topics in product line architecture?

The mind-map summarizing the panel can be seen here. [thanks to Klaus Schmid].

Towards a Reuse Reference Collection

The idea of software reuse has been around for more than four decades and the technology for searching and retrieving reusable software artefacts has certainly grown out of its infancy (cf. e.g. CodeConjurer). After about 30 years of basic research in which scientists often struggled to get their hands on meaningful numbers of reusable artifacts to evaluate their prototypes, the "open source revolution" has made software reuse a serious practical possibility. Millions of reusable files have become freely available and more sophisticated retrieval tools have emerged providing better ways of searching among them.

However, while the development of such systems has made considerable progress, their evaluation is still largely driven by proprietary approaches which are all too often neither comprehensive nor really comparable to one another. Consequently, it is also hard if not impossible to assess whether existing tools are really beneficial in a practical context.

Driven by these shortcomings, I submitted a paper ("Facilitating the Comparison of Software Retrieval Systems through a Reference Reuse Collection") to the SUITE workshop at ICSE in Cape Town where we discussed this challenge and agreed to start the creation of a reference reuse collection. Meanwhile the Universities of Irvine and Mannheim have started a first initiative and shared reusable material from their Sourcerer and merobase repositories (which comprise far more than 50,000 open source projects) with the scientific community.

Clearly, we appretiate if other researchers would join this initiative and share their data in order to have a broad basis for future comparisons of reuse tools. The next steps required for this undertaking are briefly outlined in the paper mentioned above, but as always: the devil is in the details and hence there are plenty of oportunities to contribute to this project.

RiSE in the 14th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reegineering (CSMR'2010)

Between March 15 and 18, 2010, it was held on the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid/Spain, the 14th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reegineering (CSMR'2010). CSMR is one of the most important conferences on software maintenance. Although this year there was a reduction in the number of attendees, probably because of the crises, the conference was very exciting and produced nice discussions around the work/research being presented.

In particular, I would like to emphasize the keynote speech of Serge Demeyer about in vitro and in vivo research for Software Evolution. Currently, it is a common sense in the research community that more well done experiment should be performed to evaluate our research. However, in this keynote, there was an special call for more in vivo evaluation for researches. It means that we, researchers, should be more concerned with evaluating our research/proposals in a real context, for example, applying it in real companies with the researcher shipped in it.

The RiSE group participated in the Software Evolution session of CSMR, with the the paper "An Initial Study on the Bug Report Duplication Problem", written by Yguaratã Cavalcanti, Eduardo Almeida, Carlos Cunha, Daniel Lucrédio e Silvio Meira. One interesting point for this paper, was the close relation with the keynote speech of Judith Bishop. In his speech, Bishop talked about how Microsoft has been deal with the large amount of bug reports that are coming daily through their system for bug reports submission.

We had also a good session dedicated to Software Architecture papers, where it was clear that software architecture is still increasingly becoming a fundamental step through the software development life-cycle. I specially noticed some trends to researches on software architecture recovery and reflection. In the session for software evolution, where we presented our paper, it could be noticed that change impact analysis will continue playing an important field of research.

I hope to see you in the next edition of CSMR. I would like also to thank the hospitality of Spanish people. ;)

The Scoping Process in Software Product Lines - Is there any relationship with Design?

I believe that the scoping process is very important to start a product line project. [If you are not familiar with the topic see Isabel John's papers about it and our systematic review].

However, I would like to understand more the relationship between it and the design. Let me explain better: Suppose that I am starting a product line based on a set of products. We collect all the documentation, define a product map with their features, understand and document all the commonality and variability, and that is it!

But in this case, we are defining the SPL scoping based on the existing assets (source code and documentation). From here, we can move, for example, to design the SPL architecture. However, you can observe that we are taking decisions based on the current state of the family, i.e., how it is. What are the implications for the next steps? Are we repeating the same decisions problems when the previous team created the products?

What could be a better solution: define the scope, recovery the SPL design, evaluate this design, reflect it in Scoping and moving forward?

In general sense the point is: for you, what is the relationship between scoping and design? is there any one?

What language for software reuse?

The RiSE community want to know from you if there is a specific programming language, or a type of languages, that is better for software. What do you think about it? Answer the poll on the left sidebar and let us know your opinion. If you prefer, post a comment saying the reasons for your choice(s). Cheers!