Research And Application Of Software Product Line Technology In Network Management Software Development

Consider the development of network management systems which arekinds of application system that hold a set of common features. If there is nonew development method for systematic reuse, the traditional method willnot only cause a lot of waste of software asset, but also make the system costand development cycle high. The software product line technology (SPL)proposed by CMU/SEI in its research strategic plan from 1997 to 2001 shiftour focus on analyzing the problem from a single software product to a seriesof software products or a family of them. It solves the problem mentionedabove properly.The goal of the task of the project is to develop a network managementsoftware platform. Traditional software development methods are not able tomeet the needs of the development, so we have to adopt a kind of new designand development technology. The functional requirements of multiplenetwork management systems are often identical and the bound of thenetwork management domain scopes easily that make draw a commonfeature set out easily, so the conclusion is drawn that the networkmanagement domain is an application domain adapt to introducing the SPLinto it.In the article, the theory and implementation of SPL are systematicallystudied and analyzed in network management domain. First of all, some basicproblems of SPL are specified, and a process reference model of SPL issummarized. Furthermore, some research jobs of SPL are did in networkmanagement domain, the difference and relation between feature modelingand traditional requirement specification are analyzed, the feature model ofSPL in network management domain is built, a dynamic architecture of SPLin network management is defined, and an integrating framework to handlevariable features is originated and implemented. Finally based on the projectnamed "general network management software platform", a concrete solutionof SPL in network management is originated and also designed andimplemented in detail.Requirement specification is done at first in traditional softwaredevelopment, but feature modeling is done at first in software product linedevelopment. The difference and relation between requirement specificationmodel and feature model is compared and analyzed respectively in this article.Feature model is a kind of domain-oriented requirement specification model,expresses the requirements of domain software from describing a set ofrelatively stable features and the relations between the features. The set offeatures can be categorized into two kinds: the common feature and thevariable feature. The common feature lies in each member of the systemfamily, and is the main source of reuse;the variable feature only lies in somemembers of the system family and the determinability of the scope of whichdetermine the cost of developing the members in certain domain. Featuremodel is a form of organizing requirement essentially, which provide areusable framework for the requirement of the application system in thedevelopment of it based on SPL. Even though it is like this, some extensionof the feature model which has been refined have to be made to satisfy theparticular requirement of the system. They reinforce mutually during theprocess of the extension.From thoroughly analysis of the network management domain, a suite ofsolution is originated. The research and practice demonstrate that the solutionis of great reference value, a network management prototype system can bedeveloped easily with the help of the network management software productline. In this article, the network management software product line commonasset is implemented in three parts: the application framework organizingcommon features, the integrating framework handling variable features, andthe software product line toolkit.The application framework organizes the common features in networkmanagement domain, is a partly-implemented architecture of networkmanagement software, is a technology support the design and implementationreuse of network management software. The common design decision isimplemented by the application framework which can be extended intomultiple network management system. The application frameworkimplements the reuse of software systematically. Systematic reuse guaranteesthe quality of the software, longer the lifecycle of the software, shorter thedevelopment cycle, lower the cost. The network resource managementsubsystem and the trouble management subsystem and some generalperformance and configuration management tools are implemented in theapplication framework. The design and implementation is introduced in thearticle in details.The integrating framework handling the variable features is a key part ofthe architecture of SPL, which can meet the needs of dynamically calling thebusiness component and dynamically extending the system. The frameworkemploys the reflection mechanism of Java, defines a standard interface forextension and the standard is written into a XML file, and is coupled with thepresentation layer of application framework to implement the extension tobusiness process. The implementation is specified in detail in this article.The SPL toolkit contains three suits of tools: the Data Collecting System,the Modeling Tool and the Customizing Tool, acts as the base of applicationframework. The Data Collecting System plays the role of collecting all kindsof network elements;the Modeling Tool takes charge of build the controllingmodel for all types of network;the Customizing Tool performs theresponsibility of customizing the contents of components and the relationsbetween components. The SPL toolkit is briefly introduced in this article.The outcome and method of our research and system implementation arehelpful to similar study and development.