A Generic Framework for Improving Software Product Line using an Ontological Rule Based Approach

Abstract

Software product line engineering (SPLE) is an emergent technical paradigm for generating software products. A software product line (SPL) is a family of related software intensive systems, sharing a common and managed set of features that fulfill the specific requirements of a certain domain. The main focus of SPL is software reuse in an attempt to improve the quality and productivity while reducing cost as well as time to market. Feature model (FM) is a well-known notation that represents commonality and variability of SPL. The accurate combination of features in FM allows deriving a valid product from SPL. The development and growing size of FMs may inevitably introduce inaccurate feature relationships. These relationships may cause defects in models such as defects due to redundancy, anomaly, inconsistency and wrong cardinality. These defects can be inherited in the software products built from a defective product line model. These defects diminish the quality of FMs and benefits of SPL. A defect in FM is a critical issue in the SPL community as software products are derived by reusing models. One of the major factors behind the successful derivation of defect free valid software products from SPL is the quality of FM, which in turn depends on how a defect in FM is resolved. Moreover, manually inspecting defects in large-sized FMs is a laborious task. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to resolve defects to support reusability in the industrial domain. As, it further leads to mass production of software products and provides the benefits of SPL, i.e., reduced development time, cost and improves quality of software products. The identification of defects in FM is well researched, however, providing cause of defects with their correction in a language which is easily understandable by product line (PL) developers is still a challenge.