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costs and productivity; however, it also involves a complex
software development process. Many software companies are
building applications that share more commonalities than
differences. They often repeatedly add new features and
build new variants or releases of their applications. Most
often, software development consists of creating variations
from existing software. The strategy of the planned re-
use of software artifacts promoted by SPLE has been seen
as a means to alleviate problems associated with software
development. The SPLE has a two-fold software process:
domain engineering and application engineering. These two
processes are also often called “development for re-use”
and “development with re-use”. Domain engineering is
responsible for analyzing and modeling the variability in
product lines. It also builds the core assets and defines
the production plan. The variability model is a structured
representation of the commonality and the variability of the
products in the scope of the line. One of the main notations
is feature modeling; however, metamodels are used more and
more to represent variability. Application engineering is the
process of creating a product from the product configuration
and the core assets following the production plan. Product
configuration is an assembly of variants binding the variation
points defined in the variability model. Benefits of a product
lineareclear,providedthattheinitialinvestmentwasprecisely
measured. Engineers do not have to minimize the complexity
andtheorganizationneededtosuccessfullylaunchandmanage
a software product line. There are still numerous issues in
SPLE:variability management,product derivation,core assets
exploitation, testing, traceability, and tool support are some
concerns we discuss in this topic.
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