An automated mechanism for organizing and retrieving core asset artifacts for product derivation in SPL

• Authors: Hamad I. Alsawalqah;Komi S. Abotsi;Dan Hyung Lee
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Interaction Sciences: Information Technology, Culture and Human
• Year: 2009

Software Product Line, SPL, is a software development strategy in which products are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way with product specific features to satisfy specific market segment [1]. The SPL development process is carried out in two phases: the first phase is about building core assets called domain engineering, which has gained a lot of researchers' attention. The second step is about instantiating the specifics of the products by adding to the common part the specific features that identify the product from the other application engineering. For large and complex domains, it is argued that organizing and retrieving the development of artifacts from the core asset required by the application under development is a way of shortening the application development time, thus reduces the time to market. In this paper, we propose an automation mechanism for organizing the core assets using feature based organization to divide the customized domain feature model based on the application features and their dependencies. When that retrieval step where the artifacts are represented by relations that inherit the dependencies between the features in each division of the feature model, takes place, the final result is a set of development artifacts with their traceability links to be customized based on the application variability model and integrated with the application specific artifacts. To demonstrate our work, we applied this mechanism on a watch, a case study in the digital watch domain.