Academic literature on the topic 'Software Product Lines, Variability Modeling, Non-functional Requirements, Software Quality Attributes'

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.

The multi-tenancy architecture allows software-as-a-service applications to serve multiple tenants with a single instance. This is beneficial as it leverages economies of scale. However, it does not cope with the specificities of each tenant and their variability; notably, the variability induced in the required quality levels that differ from a tenant to another. Hence, sharing one single instance hampers the fulfillment of these quality levels for all the tenants and leads to service level agreement violations. In this context, this article proposes a policy-driven middleware that configures the service according to the non-functional requirements of the tenants. The adopted approach combines software product lines engineering and model driven engineering principles. It spans the quality attributes lifecycle, from documenting them to annotating the service components with them as policies, and it enables dynamic configuration according to service level agreements terms of the tenants.

Runtime adaptive systems are able to dynamically transform their internal structure, and hence their behavior, in response to internal or external changes. Such transformations provide the basis for new functionalities or improvements of the non-functional properties that match operational requirements and standards. Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) has introduced several models and mechanisms for variability modeling and management. Dynamic software product lines (DSPL) engineering exploits the knowledge acquired in SPLE to develop systems that can be context-aware, post-deployment reconfigurable, or runtime adaptive. This paper focuses on DSPL engineering approaches for developing runtime adaptive systems and proposes a framework for classifying and comparing these approaches from two distinct perspectives: adaptation properties and adaptation realization. These two perspectives are linked together by a series of guidelines that help to select a suitable adaptation realization approach based on desired adaptation types.

Software product lines provide the opportunity to improve productivity, quality and time-to-market of software-based systems by means of systematic reuse. So as to accomplish systematic software reuse, elicitation of commonality knowledge is to be upheld by the analysis and management of variability knowledge inherent in domain requirements. Considerable effort is devoted to the management of functional variability, often neglecting the impact of quality concerns originating from non-functional requirements. In this thesis, a hybrid approach concentrating on the modeling of quantitative as well as qualitative concerns on quality has been proposed. This approach basically aims to support the domain design process by modeling non-functional variability. It further aims to support application design process by providing trade-off selection ability among quality concerns to control functional features that belong to the same domain. This approach is implemented and evaluated on an example domain to reveal its benefits on non-functional variability.

ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California
X-Tools is a collection of utilities for validation, translation, editing and report generation designed to enable the Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) community to quickly adopt the XidML 3.0 meta-data standard. This paper discusses the challenges of developing such software that meets the current and future needs of the FTI community, and meets the increasingly high quality standards expected of modern software. The paper first starts by discussing the needs of the FTI community and the specific functional requirements of software. These include the ability to fit in with legacy systems, the ability to handle many tens of thousands of parameters, support for new networked-based technologies and support for hardware from any vendor. The non-functional requirements of FTI orientated software are also described and it is suggested that the key non-functional requirements include testability, modifiability, extensibility and maintainability. Finally, as a case study, the X-Tools from ACRA CONTROL are presented. The paper discusses their design, and the tactics used to meet the functional and non-functional requirements of the FTI industry. The paper then outlines how the rigorous quality standards were met and describes the specific mechanisms used to verify the quality of the software.

The concepts of Service-Oriented Architectures and Software Product Lines are currently being paid a considerable amount of attention, both in research and in practice. Both disciplines promise to make the development of flexible, cost-effective software systems possible and to support high levels of reuse, and may sometimes be complementary to each other. In both paradigms, security is a critical issue, although most of the existing product line practices do not comprise all the security requirements engineering activities or provide automated support through which to perform these activities, despite the fact that it is widely accepted that the application of any requirements engineering process or methodology is much more difficult without a CARE (Computer-Aided Requirements Engineering) tool, since it must be performed manually. Therefore, this chapter shall present a tool denominated as SREPPLineTool, which provides automated support through which to facilitate the application of the security quality requirements engineering process for software product lines, SREPPLine. SREPPLineTool simplifies the management of security requirements in product lines by providing us with a guided, systematic and intuitive manner in which to deal with them from the early stages of product line development, thus simplifying the management and the visualization of artefact variability and traceability links and the integration of security standards, along with the management of the security reference model proposed by SREPPLine.