Research On The Software Product Line Method LI-FORM

Recent years, software product line approach has been widely used in software en-gineering. There are a lot of methods have been developed by practitioners, such as COPA, FORM, FAST, KorbA, etc. As one of the popular used methods in software product line engineering, FORM made a good achievement. FORM is short for Feature-Oriented Reuse Method, which is an extension of Feature Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA). FORM extends FODA to the software design and implementation phases and prescribes how the feature model is used to develop domain architectures and components for re-use.However, FORM has its own drawbacks. On one hand, FORM is not suitable for re-engineering of legacy systems. On another hand, there is a lack of specification during the process of domain analysis. Besides, there is a lack of specific rules to direct produc-tion. As a result, a new method LI-FORM which is short for Legacy Integrated Feature Oriented Reengineering Method was proposed based on FORM to solve these problems. Firstly, legacy systems analysis process was employed. Secondly, PuLSE-Eco was in-troduced into the domain analysis process to make a product map which is comprised of product and characteristic information. Thirdly, the process of product planning was em-ployed.LI-FORM was applied against the re-engineering process of Court Business Man-agement System which had been used for more than 10 years. The processes practiced in the domain engineering include scoping, product planning, feature modeling, core asset identification, architecture designing, and reusable component development. Meanwhile, the processes practiced in the application engineering include user requirement analysis, application architecture selection and application software development.In fact, it turns out that LI-FORM works fine. It greatly shortened the product devel-oping time and improved product quality by reusing the core assets. It reduced the risk of developing new products as well since the developers can estimate the cost of product development much more precisely. This paper describes the processes performed by the organization during the re-engineering of existing products, and summaries the lessons learned during the proc-esses of carrying out product line approach.