Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - page 98

Chapter 4
Model-Driven and Software Product
Line Engineering
Software product line engineering can bring benefits in
terms of costs and productivity by taking advantage of the
commonality within a set of similar products. These products
are adapted during the generation process with variations
in their set of features. Positive variability, as one of these
processes is referred to, relies on a core set of common
features with all products to which additional features will be
added.Model-drivenengineeringtechniquesandtoolshavethe
potential to significantly increase the productivity and quality
of software engineering processes. One question that arises is
how to integrate these two trends to increment productivity
and reduce development costs. That is, how to adapt MDE
processes for development of SPLs? How to integrate SPLE
for the development of model-driven artifacts? This chapter
explores the issues in merging MDE and SPLE to build a
production chain to capitalize on product line development,
and addresses the main concerns of model-driven and software
product line engineering, MD-SPL engineering for short. We
illustrate the approach by creating our application example of
a product line of Smart-Home systems. We include suitable