An architecture process maturity model of software product line engineering

Software architecture has been a key research area in the software engineering community due to its significant role in creating high-quality software. The trend of developing product lines rather than single products has made the software product line a viable option in the industry. Software product line architecture (SPLA) is regarded as one of the crucial components in the product lines, since all of the resulting products share this common architecture. The increased popularity of software product lines demands a process maturity evaluation methodology. Consequently, this paper presents an architecture process maturity model for software product line engineering to evaluate the current maturity of the product line architecture development process in an organization. Assessment questionnaires and a rating methodology comprise the framework of this model. The objective of the questionnaires is to collect information about the SPLA development process. Thus, in general this work contributes towards the establishment of a comprehensive and unified strategy for the process maturity evaluation of software product line engineering. Furthermore, we conducted two case studies and reported the assessment results, which show the maturity of the architecture development process in two organizations.     

Managing the business of software product line: An empirical investigation of key business factors

Business has been highlighted as a one of the critical dimensions of software product line engineering. This paper’s main contribution is to increase the understanding of the influence of key business factors by showing empirically that they play an imperative role in managing a successful software product line. A quantitative survey of software organizations currently involved in the business of developing software product lines over a wide range of operations, including consumer electronics, telecommunications, avionics, and information technology, was designed to test the conceptual model and hypotheses of the study. This is the first study to demonstrate the relationships between the key business factors and software product lines. The results provide evidence that organizations in the business of software product line development have to cope with multiple key business factors to improve the overall performance of the business, in addition to their efforts in software development. The conclusions of this investigation reinforce current perceptions of the significance of key business factors in successful software product line business.     

基于软件产品线的需求分析研究

软件产品线方法是一种面向特定领域的、大规模、大粒度的软件复用技术.在软件产品线的开发过程中,产品线需求分析是软件产品线开发的关键活动之一,软件产品线需求分析奠定了产品线构架的基础.通过分析软件产品线开发过程和软件产品线需求分析的特点,阐述了软件产品线需求分析方法以及软件产品线需求分析的实践风险.以领域分析和建模为切入点,对软件产品线的领域分析、需求建模和用例建模等关键方法和技术进行了重点的研究.     

Software performance tuning of software product family architectures: Two case studies in the real-time embedded systems domain

Software performance is an important non-functional quality attribute and software performance evaluation is an essential activity in the software development process. Especially in embedded real-time systems, software design and evaluation are driven by the needs to optimize the limited resources, to respect time deadlines and, at the same time, to produce the best experience for end-users. Software product family architectures add additional requirements to the evaluation process. In this case, the evaluation includes the analysis of the optimizations and tradeoffs for the whole products in the family. Performance evaluation of software product family architectures requires knowledge and a clear understanding of different domains: software architecture assessments, software performance and software product family architecture. We have used a scenario-driven approach to evaluate performance and dynamic memory management efficiency in one Nokia software product family architecture. In this paper we present two case studies. Furthermore, we discuss the implications and tradeoffs of software performance against evolvability and maintenability in software product family architectures.     

基于产品线N-生命周期模型的集成化软件工程环境研究

为实现软件的工业化生产,我们对日渐成熟的软件产品线体系结构、构件技术和产品线开发方法进行了分析和研究,并借鉴现代工业生产体系和自动化生产方式,提出了基于产品线体系结构的软件工程过程模型--N-生命周期模型。以此模型为基础,提出了基于产品线开发过程模型的集成化软件工程环境模型和构架,并对此环境模型和构架的实实现进行了系统的理论、技术和配置研究。文中的研究思想和成果对于基于产品线的集成化软件工程环境研究具有一定的参考和借鉴作用。     

基于产品线体系结构的软件工程过程模型研究

在借鉴现代工业的组织体系、管理规范、生产流程的基础上,针对基于软件产品线体系结构的软件工程方法和开发过程进行了系统研究,提出了基于产品线体系结构而实现软件工程化生产的N-生命周期模型.该模型的建立,对研究基于软件产品线体系结构的集成化软件工程环境,进而实现软件产品的工业化生产是非常有益且重要的.     

A business maturity model of software product line engineering

In the recent past, software product line engineering has become one of the most promising practices in software industry with the potential to substantially increase the software development productivity. Software product line engineering approach spans the dimensions of business, architecture, software engineering process and organization. The increasing popularity of software product line engineering in the software industry necessitates a process maturity evaluation methodology. Accordingly, this paper presents a business maturity model of software product line, which is a methodology to evaluate the current maturity of the business dimension of a software product line in an organization. This model examines the coordination between product line engineering and the business aspects of software product line. It evaluates the maturity of the business dimension of software product line as a function of how a set of business practices are aligned with product line engineering in an organization. Using the model presented in this paper, we conducted two case studies and reported the assessment results. This research contributes towards establishing a comprehensive and unified strategy for a process maturity evaluation of software product lines.     

Software product lines: a case study

A software product line is a family of products that share common features to meet the needs of a market area. Systematic processes have been developed to dramatically reduce the cost of a product line. Such product‐line engineering processes have proven practical and effective in industrial use, but are not widely understood. The Family‐Oriented Abstraction, Specification and Translation (FAST) process has been used successfully at Lucent Technologies in over 25 domains, providing productivity improvements of as much as four to one. In this paper, we show how to use FAST to document precisely the key abstractions in a domain, exploit design patterns in a generic product‐line architecture, generate documentation and Java code, and automate testing to reduce costs. The paper is based on a detailed case study covering all aspects from domain analysis through testing. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

产品线工程理论应用与研究

产品线工程（Product Line Engineering）是运用软件重用思想的一种软件开发方法,它属于一种大粒度的软件复用方式,用于开发相同领域的类似产品过程。由于PLE强调针对特定产品集合的领域开发和面向重用技术,所以能有效地提高软件产品的开发效率和质量,降低软件开发成本。文中介绍了PLE理论,着重研究产品线模型、开发模式、生命周期和体系结构,介绍领域工程和应用工程在生命周期内部的交互作用。通过产品线开发周期分析和比较出PLE在系统开发过程中的特点,最后介绍PLE在HIS系统中的开发应用。     

Introducing the FR500 embedded microprocessor

Because conventional RISC processors have insufficient processing power to support the continuing development of digital consumer products, we need a new high performance processor for multimedia applications. Processing multimedia video images requires more than 10 times the currently available performance. At Fujitsu, we provide this higher performance in software to attain a high degree of flexibility. We developed the FR500 microprocessor with a novel embedded VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture for use in such digital consumer products. The FR500 is the first product in the FR-V line, Fujitsu's generic name for VLIW architecture microprocessors. The FR-V line offers the flexibility to develop new products optimized for a wide variety of digital consumer products. In this paper, we describe the FR-V architecture, which includes our variable-length VLIW and instruction set architectures, speculative execution control, and conditional execution control. We also evaluate its performance     

Towards Testing Product Line Architectures

A product line architecture is a single specification capturing the overall architecture of a series of closely related products. Its structure consists of a set of mandatory elements and a set of variation points. Whereas mandatory elements are part of the architecture of every product in the product line architecture, variation points precisely define the dimensions along which the architectures of individual products differ from each other.The increased use of product line architectures in today's software development projects poses several challenges for existing testing techniques. In this paper we discuss those challenges and discuss what we believe are opportunities for addressing them.     

基于度量的软件生产线管理研究

软件生产线是一种全新的软件开发方式,生产线的管理作为三大基本活动之一直接影响生产线实践。从软件度量角度出发,根据GQ(I) M模型,提出了基于度量的软件生产线管理框架,并定义了管理活动中需要跟踪的度量元,这对生产线管理活动的有效实施有积极的指导意义。     

软件生产线方法

与分析、设计和实现单个软件系统的传统软件工程方法不同 ,本文提出一种开发和维护系列软件系统的生产线方法 .该方法是一种领域特有的 ,以体系结构为中心的 ,过程驱动的 ,基于技术的系统化方法 .重点探讨方法论、生产线、工具和技术     

基于产品线工程方法提高组件容器的可复用性

组件容器为组件提供部署和运行环境,是基于组件的分布式应用开发的核心。近年来,开发网构软件的需求驱动着组件技术持续改进,新型组件不断涌现,这对组件容器的开发效率提出更高的要求。因此,在组件容器开发过程中大规模复用已有的软件资产变得非常重要。在许多情况下,产品线工程已被证实是有效的系统化复用的工程方法。首先探讨将产品线工程应用于组件容器开发所面临的主要困难,并提出相应的解决方案;然后给出了一个组件容器的产品线——PLACE的设计,解释了其两个主要部分:产品线体系结构和产品派生流程;最后,通过一个实际案例,展示利用PLACE设计开发组件容器的完整过程,结果证实体系结构和源代码的复用性都有一定程度的提高。     

产品线体系结构层次组装技术研究

产品线体系结构是软件产品线成功开发的基础,层次组装是产品线体系结构设计的重要支撑技术。在产品线体系结构描述语言vADL的基础上,针对产品线体系结构层次组装的特点,首次引入变化性组装概念,并研究了两种变化性组装技术:变量映射和守护条件约束。在传统端口绑定基础上,引入组装件技术支持多个异型组件端口组装和多种类型的端口行为组装。给出基于π演算理论的行为组装推导算法,并充分考虑变化性对行为组装的影响。     

A scoped approach to traceability management

Traceability is the ability to describe and follow the life of a software artifact and a means for modeling the relations between software artifacts in an explicit way. Traceability has been successfully applied in many software engineering communities and has recently been adopted to document the transition among requirements, architecture and implementation. We present an approach to customize traceability to the situation at hand. Instead of automating tracing, or representing all possible traces, we scope the traces to be maintained to the activities stakeholders must carry out. We define core traceability paths, consisting of essential traceability links required to support the activities. We illustrate the approach through two examples: product derivation in software product lines, and release planning in software process management. By using a running software product line example, we explain why the core traceability paths identified are needed when navigating from feature to structural models and from family to product level and backward between models used in software product derivation. A feasibility study in release planning carried out in an industrial setting further illustrates the use of core traceability paths during production and measures the increase in performance of the development processes supported by our approach. These examples show that our approach can be successfully used to support both product and process traceability in a pragmatic yet efficient way.     

产品线体系结构复杂性度量

产品线体系结构需要支持多种变化性以满足其内部成员特性，因而是重要又复杂的软件产品线子系统。本文通过分析产品线体系结构的vADL规约，充分考虑产品线体系结构变化性对其复杂性度量的影响，生成产品线体系结构信息流图PLA—IFG，基于PLA—IFG，实现自动化度量产品线体系结构复杂性，提出了支持变化性的产品线体系结构复杂性度量方法。     

Quality assessment in competition-based software crowdsourcing

Quality assessment is a critical component in crowdsourcing-based software engineering (CBSE) as software products are developed by the crowd with unknown or varied skills and motivations. In this paper, we propose a novel metric called the project score to measure the performance of projects and the quality of products for competitionbased software crowdsourcing development (CBSCD) activities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to deal with the quality issue of CBSE in the perspective of projects instead of contests. In particular, we develop a hierarchical quality evaluation framework for CBSCD projects and come up with two metric aggregation models for project scores. The first model is a modified squale model that can locate the software modules of poor quality, and the second one is a clustering-based aggregationmodel, which takes different impacts of phases into account. To test the effectiveness of the proposed metrics, we conduct an empirical study on TopCoder, which is a famous CBSCD platform. Results show that the proposed project score is a strong indicator of the performance and product quality of CBSCD projects.We also find that the clustering-based aggregation model outperforms the Squale one by increasing the percentage of the performance evaluation criterion of aggregation models by an additional 29%. Our approach to quality assessment for CBSCD projects could potentially facilitate software managers to assess the overall quality of a crowdsourced project consisting of programming contests.     

An organizational maturity model of software product line engineering

Software product line engineering is an inter-disciplinary concept. It spans the dimensions of business, architecture, process, and the organization. Some of the potential benefits of this approach include cost reduction, improvements in product quality and a decrease in product development time. The increasing popularity of software product line engineering in the software industry necessitates a process maturity evaluation methodology. Accordingly, this paper presents an organizational maturity model of software product line engineering for evaluating the maturity of organizational dimension. The model assumes that organizational theories, behavior, and management play a critical role in the institutionalization of software product line engineering within an organization. Assessment questionnaires and a rating methodology comprise the framework of this model. The objective and design of the questionnaires are to collect information about the software product line engineering process from the dual perspectives of organizational behavior and management. Furthermore, we conducted two case studies and reported the assessment results using the organizational maturity model presented in this paper.