An overview of Dynamic Software Product Line architectures and techniques: Observations from research and industry
Journal article, 2014

Over the last two decades, software product lines have been used successfully in industry for building families of systems of related products, maximizing reuse, and exploiting their variable and configurable options. In a changing world, modern software demands more and more adaptive features, many of them performed dynamically, and the requirements on the software architecture to support adaptation capabilities of systems are increasing in importance. Today, many embedded system families and application domains such as ecosystems, service-based applications, and self-adaptive systems demand runtime capabilities for flexible adaptation, reconfiguration, and post-deployment activities. However, as traditional software product line architectures fail to provide mechanisms for runtime adaptation and behavior of products, there is a shift toward designing more dynamic software architectures and building more adaptable software able to handle autonomous decision-making, according to varying conditions. Recent development approaches such as Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs) attempt to face the challenges of the dynamic conditions of such systems but the state of these solution architectures is still immature. In order to provide a more comprehensive treatment of DSPL models and their solution architectures, in this research work we provide an overview of the state of the art and current techniques that, partially, attempt to face the many challenges of runtime variability mechanisms in the context of Dynamic Software Product Lines. We also provide an integrated view of the challenges and solutions that are necessary to support runtime variability mechanisms in DSPL models and software architectures. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Feature models

FAMILIES

RECONFIGURATION

Dynamic Software Product Lines

Dynamic variability

CHALLENGES

Software architecture

WEB SERVICES

FEATURE MODELS

RUNTIME VARIABILITY

SYSTEMS

MANAGE

ADAPTATION

Author

R. Capilla

Rey Juan Carlos University (URJC)

Jan Bosch

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

P. Trinidad

University of Seville

A. Ruiz-Cortes

University of Seville

M. Hinchey

Lero - The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre

Journal of Systems and Software

0164-1212 (ISSN)

Vol. 91 1 3-23

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

Software Engineering

DOI

10.1016/j.jss.2013.12.038

More information

Latest update

7/24/2019