scholarly journals Peer Review #2 of "Taking advantage of the software product line paradigm to generate customized user interfaces for decision-making processes: a case study on university employability (v0.1)"

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. e203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Vázquez-Ingelmo ◽  
Francisco J. García-Peñalvo ◽  
Roberto Therón

University employment and, specifically, employability has gained relevance since research in these fields can lead to improvement in the quality of life of individual citizens. However, empirical research is still insufficient to make significant decisions, and relying on powerful tools to explore data and reach insights on these fields is paramount. Information dashboards play a key role in analyzing and visually exploring data about a specific topic or domain, but end users can present several necessities that differ from each other, regarding the displayed information itself, design features and even functionalities. By applying a domain engineering approach (within the software product line paradigm), it is possible to produce customized dashboards to fit into particular requirements, by the identification of commonalities and singularities of every product that could be part of the product line. Software product lines increase productivity, maintainability and traceability regarding the evolution of the requirements, among other benefits. To validate this approach, a case study of its application in the context of the Spanish Observatory for University Employability and Employment system has been developed, where users (Spanish universities and administrators) can control their own dashboards to reach insights about the employability of their graduates. These dashboards have been automatically generated through a domain specific language, which provides the syntax to specify the requirements of each user. The domain language fuels a template-based code generator, allowing the generation of the dashboards’ source code. Applying domain engineering to the dashboards’ domain improves the development and maintainability of these complex software products given the variety of requirements that users might have regarding their graphical interfaces.


2015 ◽  
Vol 77 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahliza A. Halim ◽  
Dayang N. A. Jawawi ◽  
Noraini Ibrahim ◽  
M. Zulkifli M. Zaki ◽  
Safaai Deris

Software Product Line (SPL) is an effective approach in software reuse in which core assets can be shared among the members of the product line with an explicit treatment of variability. Core assets, which are developed for reuse in domain engineering, are selected for product specific derivation in application engineering. Decision making support during product derivation is crucial to assist in making multiple decisions during product specific derivation. Multiple decisions are to be resolved at the architectural level as well as the detailed design level, address the need for assisting the decision making process during core asset derivation. Architectural level decision making is based on imprecise, uncertain and subjective nature of stakeholder for making architectural selection based on non- functional requirements (NFR). Furthermore, detail design level involves the selection of suitable features which have the rationale behind each decision. The rationale for the selection, if not documented properly, will also result in loss of tacit knowledge. Therefore, a multi-attribute architecture design decision technique is proposed to overcome the above mentioned problem. The technique combines Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) with lightweight architecture design decision documentation to support the decision making during core asset derivation. We demonstrate our approach using the case study of Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR). The case study implementation shows showed that the proposed technique supports software engineer in the process of decision making at the architecture and detail design levels.


2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heiko Koziolek ◽  
Thomas Goldschmidt ◽  
Thijmen de Gooijer ◽  
Dominik Domis ◽  
Stephan Sehestedt ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Suet Chun Lee

Software product line (SPL) is a software engineering paradigm for software development. A software product within a product line often has specific functionalities that are not common to all other products within the product line. Those specific functionalities are termed “variant features” in a product line. SPL paradigm involves the modeling of variant features. However, little work in SPL investigates and addresses the modeling of variant features specific to user interface (UI). Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the de facto modeling language for object-oriented software systems. It is known that UML needs better support in modeling UIs. Thus, much research developed UML extensions to improve UML support in modeling UIs. Yet little of this work is related to developing such extensions for modeling UIs for SPLs in which variant features specific to UI modeling must be addressed. This research develops a UML extension -Web User Interface Modeling Language (WUIML) to address these problems. WUIML defines elements for modeling variant features specific to user interfaces for Web-based SPLs. The model elements in WUIML extend from the metaclass and BasicActivity of the UML2.0 metamodel. WUIML integrates the modeling of variant features specific to user interfaces to UML. For example, in a Web-based patient registration software product line, member products targeting British users may use British date format in the user interface, while member products targeting United States users may use United States date format in the user interface. Thus, this is a variant feature for this product line. WUIML defines a model element, XOR, to represent such exclusive or conditions in a product line user interface model. WUIML would reduce SPL engineers’ efforts needed in UI development. To validate the WUIML research outcome, a case study was conducted. The results of this empirical study indicate that modeling UIs for Web-based SPLs using WUIML is more effective and efficient than using standard UML.


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