MULTIPLE – Multimodeling Approach for Quality-Aware Software Product Lines

The production of quality software, on time, and within budget, remains an open problem of Software Engineering that has been addressed from different approaches. An industrial approach to this problem is to use Software Product Lines (SPL). However, current works on SPL usually focus on a single system view (the feature model of the system). One disadvantage on this is that this single view (even extended with non-functional characteristics) cannot properly define the extent of a software product line. Moreover, this approach assumes a small number of variants perfectly defined as instances of a feature model. However, this situation is not always possible. The variants are beyond the act of monotonically adding/removing functionality to the base architecture of a product line.

The objective of this project is to define and implement a technological framework for developing high-quality software product lines. This framework is based on the existence of several models or system views (functionality, features, quality,…) with relationships among them. This approach implies the parameterization of the software production process by means of a Multimodel which is able to capture the different views of the product and the relationships among them. This approach lead us to re-consider the problems related to the intra (e.g., consistence of the feature model) and inter-model consistency (eg., correspondence between the feature and the quality models) in a broader and realistic context. In the project, we will use a more expressive logic than the propositional (MEL – Membership Equational Logic) and its operationalization in MOMENT2 as back-end which supports the production and edition of the multimodel as well as the software production (SPL instances).

The fact of (i) implementing an operative technological framework (using model transformations), (ii) empirical validating the multimodel through controlled experiments which will allow a feedback for improving the models and metamodels used (which are hypothetically the appropriate ones), (iii) evolving the multimodel based on the empirical evidence gathered, will allow us to implement a software production process that will simultaneously satisfies the required functional and non-functional requirements. We believe that the definition of a technological framework that properly combines the abovementioned technologies represent a critical step towards the production of quality software. The application of this technology for developing products in the domains of games, and Web portals on service-oriented architectures will allow us to put our approach into practice and demonstrate its usefulness.

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