Information Technology Reference
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4.7. Summary
Software product line engineering brings benefits in
terms of costs and productivity by taking advantage of the
commonality. Model driven engineering techniques and tools
have,without any doubt,the potential to significantly increase
the productivity and quality of software engineering processes.
Although the integration of both approaches is promising, it
requires a tight coupling and tuning of the derivation chain.
This chapter exposes a general view of the MDE product line
and some issues about capturing the variability of different
software views and configuring and deriving products in a
multi-staged process. The notion of view has been used for
years in software engineering. It is mandatory to develop
complex systems with several stakeholders: requirement
analysts, architects, designers, programmers, concerned with
several different aspects of the software system (requirements,
architectures,GUI,persistence,concurrency,distribution,etc.).
Thischapterfocusesoncapturingthevariabilityindifferent
models conforming to metamodels, configuring the product,
and defining an automated production chain relying on a
multi-staged process. We make explicit examples of variability
models with the facilities and architectural feature models
and we show how these models are taken into account
in the transformation process. The derivation process is a
complex task and it requires sequences of transformations
that need a precise scheduling. Decision models are artifacts
specifyingbaseandspecifictransformationrulesforscheduling
the rules for both commonality and variability. To schedule
these rules correctly, the mechanism uses aspect-oriented
programming. Decision models capture transformational
aspects of the baseline derivation process to derive specific
variableapplications.ThisgeneralMD-SPLprocessiseffective
but it is not always sufficiently flexible for fine-grained
configuration. We need rather to configure differently several
instances of the same kind of artifacts. The next chapter
discusses this issue and presents the FieSta solution.
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