Modeling Dependent Software Product Lines

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (M. Rosenmüller, N. Siegmund, S. ur Rahman, C. Kästner)
Sat, 05 Mar 2016 18:41:39 -0500

Marko Rosenmüller, Norbert Siegmund, Syed Saif ur Rahman, and Christian Kästner. Modeling Dependent Software Product Lines. In Proceedings of the GPCE Workshop on Modularization, Composition and Generative Techniques for Product Line Engineering (McGPLE), pages 13--18, Passau, Germany: Department of Informatics and Mathematics, University of Passau, October 2008.

Software product line development is a mature technique to implement similar programs tailored to serve the needs of multiple users while providing a high degree of reuse. This approach also scales for larger product lines that use smaller product lines to fulfill special tasks. In such compositions of SPLs, the interacting product lines depend on each other and programs generated from these product lines have to be correctly configured to ensure correct communication between them. Constraints between product lines can be used to allow only valid combinations of generated programs. This, however, is not sufficient if multiple instances of one product line are involved. In this paper we present an approach that uses UML and OO concepts to model compositions of SPLs. The model extends the approach of constraints between SPLs to constraints between instances of SPLs and integrates SPL specialization. Based on this model we apply a feature-oriented approach to simplify the configuration of complete SPL compositions.