Home // ICSEA 2014, The Ninth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances // View article
Authors:
Anissa Benlarabi
Amal Khtira
Bouchra El Asri
Keywords: Software product lines; Co-evolution; Cladistics.
Abstract:
Software product line engineering is a discipline for large scale reuse, its main advantage is the ability to reuse a set of domain assets in the development of a large number of products. In order to achieve this benefit, the software product line must cope with business requirements evolution. When dealing with evolution, the most effort must be granted to the understanding of the change and the identification of its impact because changes happening to products must be propagated to domain artifacts that are used for the whole family, and if the impact is not studied, each product will evolve separately from the domain assets. Many techniques were proposed to facilitate the impact analysis, such as evolution traceability or documentation. However, they consider only the change on the domain assets level and they underestimate issues raised by the fact when products evolve separately from the domain assets, which decreases the ability of the software product line to derive all the products features. In this paper, we tackle this issue by analyzing the co-evolution of software product lines and their products. We use cladistics classification, which was used in biology to construct their evolutionary trees, then we compare the trees using mathematical analysis and we propose a solution to restore the perfect co-evolution of the software product line and its products. We carried out a case study on a Mobile Media software product line to illustrate our approach.
Pages: 495 to 501
Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014
Publication date: October 12, 2014
Published in: conference
ISSN: 2308-4235
ISBN: 978-1-61208-367-4
Location: Nice, France
Dates: from October 12, 2014 to October 16, 2014