Development Methods, Based On The Body, Feature-driven Product Line

Software reuse and component technology have been widely accepted as new paradigms for promotion of efficiency and quality of software development. Based on the development of these technologies and the long-term success of product line in manufacturing, SEI proposed the concept of software product line (SPL). A SPL is a set of software systems in the same business domain sharing common features, and SPL methods try to construct a common set of core assets in advance, so that specific software products can be rapidly and efficiently developed from the core assets in a prescribed way.SPL is a domain-oriented, systematic, comprehensive, and component-based paradigm. It differs from fortuitous reuse and single-system development with reuse. So domain-level requirement analysis and SPL architecture are essential in SPL development and can determine the reusability and flexibility of the core assets among various products.The research of this paper aims at the main stages in SPL development including domain analysis and modeling, architecture design and application engineering. The widely-used feature modeling method is adopted in domain analysis and ontology is introduced as the basis of feature modeling. Furthermore, the ontology-based feature model is also taken as the basis for architecture and component design. Then the main stages of SPL can be connected organically and transitions between related activities can be greatly smoothed.First, this paper proposes an ontology-based feature modeling method. A unified feature meta-model for domain models and application models is defined on ontology concepts. A well modularity mechanism is provided and consistency checking can be performed by ontology inference.Second, a static description framework for component semantics and a representation method for behavior protocol of components are proposed based on the feature ontology. CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) and feature semantics are combined in the behavior protocol. And the feature-based description of component semantics and behavior makes it possible to map feature models to architecture and component models. Reuse-oriented component and architecture adaptation is also enabled.Third, a feature model and component semantics based method for conceptual architecture design is proposed. Commonality, variability, binding time, structural relations, and dependencies are taken into account in the method. Reuse-oriented component adaptation and connector design are also discussed.Finally, we present the application-oriented customization method of the feature model and architecture, and demonstrate the methods by a development instance and the related implementation tools.In conclusion, this paper aims at the big gap between the problem domain (requirement model) and the solution domain (architecture and component model) in SPL development and difficulties in requirement traceability and the architecture-level flexibility and customizability. The concept of feature engineering and domain engineering are combined and ontology-based feature semantics is proposed to connect feature models (the problem domain) and architectures (the solution domain). So the transition between the two domains is smoothed and ontology-inference based consistency maintenance between feature model and architecture is also enabled. The methods have been implemented in the related tools, including ontology-based feature modeling tool and feature-based architecture design tool. Both of them have exhibited effective support for SPL development.