Research On Synchronization Technology Of Asset And Application Product In Software Product Line

Software product line is an efficient way to develop a set of products with similar requirements. During the development of software product line, feature as the first class entity in domain requirements, can show the commons and variability in domain by feature model, at the same time the traceability between features and other domain assets can ensure the correctness of generating products. Software product line is continuously evolving for the domain’s extension or change of requirements, and both the domain assets and products can evolve independently, the evolution will reflect on the change of domain feature model and product feature models. Software product line will lose the stability if disregarding the changes, and software product line organization will also lose the control of software product line development. So, it’s necessary to provide a synchronization mechanism to ensure the consistency between domain assets and products.We propose a synchronization method for domain assets and products after analyzing the evolution scenario and the synchronization requirements. The method firstly synchronize the feature model in domain assets and products, then synchronize other artifacts based on the feature model’s synchronization results and the traceability between feature models and other artifacts. The core of the method is a feature model evolution Sync Framework. The framework contains a general feature model meta-model and a set of synchronization rules based on the meta-model. The framework can support a semi-automatic and interactive synchronization process between domain feature model and product feature model. The general feature model can unify different kinds of feature models. Different kinds of feature models can reuse the framework’s synchronization facilities by providing the transformation code between itself and the general feature model. In addition, we realize a tool prototype of our synchronization method and use an example to verify the usability of our method and the Sync Framework.