A Framework for Seamless Variant Management and Incremental Migration to a Software Product-Line
Licentiate thesis, 2022
Objective: The overarching goal of this PhD is to bridge the gap between clone&own and software product-line engineering in a risk-free, smooth, and accurate manner. Consequently, in the first part of the PhD, we focus on the conceptualization, formalization, and implementation of a framework for migrating from a lean architecture to a platform-based one.
Method: Our objectives are met by means of (i) understanding the literature relevant to variant-management and product-line migration and determining the research gaps (ii) surveying the dominant process models for SPLE and comparing them against the contemporary industrial practices, (iii) devising a framework for incremental SPL adoption, and (iv) investigating the benefit of using features beyond PL migration; facilitating model comprehension.
Results: Four main results emerge from this thesis. First, we present a qualitative analysis of the state-of-the-art frameworks for change propagation and product-line migration. Second, we compare the contemporary industrial practices with the ones prescribed in the process models for SPL adoption, and provide an updated process model that unifies the two to accurately reflect the real practices and guide future practitioners. Third, we devise a framework for incremental migration of variants into a fully integrated platform by exploiting explicitly recorded metadata pertaining to clone and feature-to-asset traceability. Last, we investigate the impact of using different variability mechanisms on the comprehensibility of various model-related tasks.
Future work: As ongoing and future work, we aim to integrate our framework with existing IDEs and conduct a developer study to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of using our framework. We also aim to incorporate safe-evolution in our operators.
Model Comprehension
Variability Mechanisms Process Models
Variant-rich Systems
Software Product-Line Engineering
Author
Wardah Mahmood
University of Gothenburg
Seamless Variability Management with the Virtual Platform
2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE),;(2021)
Paper in proceeding
Promote-pl: a round-trip engineering process model for adopting and evolving product lines
SPLC 2020 - 24th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference,;Vol. A(2020)p. 1-12
Paper in proceeding
W. Mahmood, D. Strüber · A. Anjorin, T. Berger “Effects of Variability in Models: A Family of Experiments” Accepted at Empirical Software Engineering Journal.
Infrastructure
C3SE (Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering)
Subject Categories
Software Engineering
Doktorsavhandlingar vid Chalmers tekniska högskola. Ny serie: 5084
Publisher
Chalmers
Online and Room 473, Jupiter, Hörselgången 5, Gothenburg
Opponent: Iris Reinhartz-Berger, Professor at University of Haifa, Israel