scholarly journals Embedding Quality into Software Product Line Variability Artifacts

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
Mworia Daniel ◽  
Nderu Lawrence ◽  
Kimwele Michael
Keyword(s):  
Data Storage ◽  
Analytical Description ◽  
Software Product Line ◽  
Poor Quality ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Product Line ◽  
Functional Requirements ◽  
Functional Quality ◽  
Software Product ◽  
Variability Management

The success of any software product line development project is closely tied to its domain variability management. Whereas a lot of effort has been put into functional variability management by the SPL community, non-functional variability is considered implicit. The result has been dissatisfaction among clients due to resultant poor quality systems. This work presents an integrated requirement specification template for quality and functional requirements at software product line variation points. The implementation of this approach at the analytical description phase increases the visibility of quality requirements obliging developers to implement them. The approach proposes the use of decision tree classification techniques to support the weaving of functional quality attributes at respective variation points. This work, therefore, promotes software product line variability management objectives by proposing new functional quality artifacts during requirements specification phase. The approach is illustrated with an exemplar mobile phone family data storage requirements case study.

scholarly journals Integrated Specification of Quality Requirements in Software Product Line Artifacts

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mworia Daniel ◽  
Nderu Lawrence ◽  
Kimwele Michael
Keyword(s):  
Data Storage ◽  
Analytical Description ◽  
Software Product Line ◽  
Product Line ◽  
Functional Requirements ◽  
System Quality ◽  
Quality Requirements ◽  
Software Product ◽  
Definition Of

There are many calls from software engineering scholars to incorporate non-functional requirements as first-class citizens in the software development process. In Software Product Line Engineering emphasis is on explicit definition of functional requirements using feature models while non-functional requirements are considered implicit. In this paper we present an integrated requirements specification template for common quality attributes alongside functional requirements at software product line variation points. This approach implemented at analytical description phase increases the visibility of quality requirements obliging developers to consider them in subsequent phases. The approach achieves weaving of quality requirements into associated functional requirements through higher level feature abstraction method. This work therefore promotes achievement of system quality by elevating nonfunctional requirement specification. The approach is illustrated with an exemplar mobile phone family data storage requirements case study.

A Comparison of Software Product Line Traceability Approaches from End-to-End Traceability Perspectives

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (04) ◽  
pp. 677-714 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingyu Kim ◽  
Sungwon Kang ◽  
Jihyun Lee
Keyword(s):  
Software Development ◽  
Software Product Line ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Product Line ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Software Development Project ◽  
Software Traceability ◽  
Software Product ◽  
End To End

Software traceability is the ability to provide trace information on requirements, design, and implementation of a system. It helps stakeholders understand the many associations of software artifacts created during a software development project. End-to-end traceability refers to linkage of all artifacts in the entire lifecycle of a software development project. Its goal is to provide stakeholders of the software development with trace information in order to analyze impacts due to changes in a software system. Compared to that of a single product, the end-to-end traceability of software product line is more complicated because Software Product Line Development (SPLD) requires two separate but intimately related phases of domain engineering and application engineering. Various SPLD traceability approaches have been proposed in the past. However, thus far no research work on SPLD traceability has focused on SPLD end-to-end traceability. This paper defines SPLD end-to-end traceability and evaluates the existing SPLD traceability approaches from SPLD end-to-end traceability perspectives. We surveyed studies on SPLD traceability methods, traceability mechanisms used in major SPLD approaches, and software traceability survey papers. We compared the existing SPLD traceability approaches based on Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Through the survey, we found that none of the SPLD traceability studies fully supports SPLD end-to-end traceability, and there are unexplored research areas of SPLD end-to-end traceability in the existing SPLD traceability studies. The contribution of this paper is that it presents future research directions that give research guidelines for each unexplored research area in SPLD end-to-end traceability. Finally, based on the research directions, this paper suggests future research opportunities for SPLD end-to-end traceability.

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