Software Product Line Integration Technology

More and more organizations begin to adopt the software product line approach for developing systems, and they are realizing the importance of the integration techniques. Integration is done at several levels and stages of the software development lifecycles: integrating the work of a team working in the same implementation subsystem, and integrating subsystems into a complete system. The goal of integration is to produce a qualified build.In the late 1990's, the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) launched a technical initiative, the Product Line Practice Initiative, to help facilitate and accelerate the transition to sound software engineering practices using a product line approach. Software System Integration (SSI) is one of key practice areas described in the Framework for Software Product Line Practice (PLP) which was published by the SEI. A product line oriented total solution is needed to keep the correctness, completeness, consistentency, stability and testability of the system integration, especially to those large product lines with complex dependency releations.This thesis synthesizes the practices in an ERP Product Line, and presents the concept of the Integration Technique Framework (ITF). The Integration Technique Framework provides integration techniques infrastructures to the SSI activities, and can be tailored to satisfy the requirements of specific product line, or be extended to adopt the recent developments in the integration techniques and tools.ITF involves five essential components: (1) Integration References, (2) Integration Premises, (3) Integration Facts, (4) Integration Rules, and (5) Integration Consequences. The knowledgebase approach can be used to instantiate the ITF and organize these components into the Integration KnowledgeBase (IKB). Experts can use IKB to match Integration Facts with Integration Rules, reason about Integration Premises and Integration Rules, and finally create the build scripts automatically.This thesis summarizes the practices in an ERP software product line, and provides a...