Model-Driven Engineering - Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - page 95

and model weaving help in requirements engineering? How do
we use it to structure the concerns and elaborate variability
models of a product line?
An important question in SPLE is variability management.
The first trend is to use feature models, which express a coarse
grained variability grouping set of consistent requirements
called features. Another trend, widely used in SPL and MDE,
is to have several models capturing different variabilities:
domain space, structural models, and technical platform
specificities. These models allow a variable-grained approach
forvariability.Thus,oneimportantquestionishowtoconciliate
these different ways to manage variability in a consistent
framework? Both have their advantages and seem devoted to
different steps of the development cycle.
For domain engineering, the challenge is to build realistic
tool chains starting from a feature model and leading to
code generation. The designers have to build an adequate
representation of the product family at each level. For
instance, at the architectural level, the architecture
should express all the possible products. It can be viewed
as a “super-architecture” superimposing all the products and
allowing the selection of a given specific product architecture
from the selection of its configuration. The product line
reference architecture is the basis for all products and is
developed as a creative task. The main approach is to build
some template models incorporating annotations that describe
what components should be inserted and connected when
selecting a feature. Thus, we need to link variation points
from a variability model to variants occurring in the products.
The tool chain needs several well-defined stages; for instance,
domain space modeling with feature model, architecture
modeling with UML, and code generation with Java. It is not
yet clear which language to use to link variability and variants
to allow an automatic derivation mechanism.
For application engineering, two possible uses of MDE are
the configuration process and the product derivation process.