Thesis (Ph. D. in Computer Science)--Vanderbilt University, Dec. 2005. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Dallas, 2009. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-234)

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2008. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains xi, 126 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-126).

No description available.

In software product line engineering, the construction of an architecture for a product family is still an outstanding engineering challenge. In current practice, a framework is used for configuring individual products by combining solution space artefacts into products with specified features according to a feature model. No architectures are created. In contrast, an architecture for a product family would define the architectures for all the products in the family, allowing engineers to reason at a higher level of abstraction. In this thesis, we present a component model that can be used to define architectures for product families, by incorporating explicit variation points.

Research in Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) traditionally focuses on product derivation. Prior work has explored the automated derivation of products by module composition. However, it has so far neglected propagating changes (edits) in a product back to the product line definition. A domain-specific product should be possible to update its features locally, and later these changes should be propagated back to the product line definition automatically. Otherwise, the entire product line has to be revised manually in order to make the changes permanent. Although this is the current state, it is a very error-prone process. To address these issues, we present a tool called Paan to create product lines of MS Word documents with back-propagation support. It is a diff-based tool that ignores unchanged fragments and reveals fragments that are changed, added or deleted. Paan takes a document with variation points (VPs) as input, and shreds it into building blocks called tiles. Only those tiles that are new or have changed must be updated in the tile repository. In this way, changes in composed documents can be back-propagated to their original feature module definitions. A document is synthesized by retrieving the appropriate tiles and composing them. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2007. / Additional advisors: Jeff G. Gray, Marjan Mernik, Rajeev Raje, Chengcui Zhang. Description based on contents viewed Feb. 7, 2008; title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 216-230).

The software development continues to become more competitive and demanding, placing pressure on developers. Changes in the international political climate have resulted in shrinking military budgets, putting developers of defence software under further pressure. At present, systematic reuse is probably the most realistic way of addressing this pressure by improving software development productivity and quality. Software product line (SPL) engineering provides a comprehensive approach to systematic software reuse and is becoming widely accepted. The focus of this interpretive case study was ground station software development in a small multidisciplinary project-centric company which produces avionics systems for military aircraft. The purpose of the study was to investigate the potential implementation of systematic software reuse in the company. The study consisted of three phases, a literature study, a contextualisation and a set of field interviews, and used elements of the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Product Line Practice Framework to examine the suitability of SPL engineering for the company. The findings of the study highlight the potential challenges that SPL engineering poses for the company, and emphasise how the company's project-centric structure could impede its implementation of systematic software reuse. / Computing / M.Sc. (Information Systems)

Les lignes de produits logicielles constituent une approche permettant de construire et de maintenir une famille de produits logiciels similaires mettant en œuvre des principes de réutilisation. Ces principes favorisent la réduction de l'effort de développement et de maintenance, raccourcissent le temps de mise sur le marché et améliorent la qualité globale du logiciel. La migration de produits logiciels similaires vers une ligne de produits demande de comprendre leurs similitudes et leurs différences qui s'expriment sous forme de caractéristiques (features) offertes. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons au problème de la construction d'une ligne de produits à partir du code source de ses produits et de certains artefacts complémentaires comme les diagrammes de cas d'utilisation, quand ils existent. Nous proposons des contributions sur l'une des étapes principales dans cette construction, qui consiste à extraire et à organiser un modèle de caractéristiques (feature model) dans un mode automatisé. La première contribution consiste à extraire des caractéristiques dans le code source de variantes de logiciels écrits dans le paradigme objet. Trois techniques sont mises en œuvre pour parvenir à cet objectif : l'Analyse Formelle de Concepts, l'Indexation Sémantique Latente et l'analyse des dépendances structurelles dans le code. Elles exploitent les parties communes et variables au niveau du code source. La seconde contribution s'attache à documenter une caractéristique extraite par un nom et une description. Elle exploite le code source mais également les diagrammes de cas d'utilisation, qui contiennent, en plus de l'organisation logique des fonctionnalités externes, des descriptions textuelles de ces mêmes fonctionnalités. En plus des techniques précédentes, elle s'appuie sur l'Analyse Relationnelle de Concepts afin de former des groupes d'entités d'après leurs relations. Dans la troisième contribution, nous proposons une approche visant à organiser les caractéristiques, une fois documentées, dans un modèle de caractéristiques. Ce modèle de caractéristiques est un arbre étiqueté par des opérations et muni d'expressions logiques qui met en valeur les caractéristiques obligatoires, les caractéristiques optionnelles, des groupes de caractéristiques (groupes ET, OU, OU exclusif), et des contraintes complémentaires textuelles sous forme d'implication ou d'exclusion mutuelle. Ce modèle est obtenu par analyse d'une structure obtenue par Analyse Formelle de Concepts appliquée à la description des variantes par les caractéristiques. L'approche est validée sur trois cas d'étude principaux : ArgoUML-SPL, Health complaint-SPL et Mobile media. Ces cas d'études sont déjà des lignes de produits constituées. Nous considérons plusieurs produits issus de ces lignes comme s'ils étaient des variantes de logiciels, nous appliquons notre approche, puis nous évaluons son efficacité par comparaison entre les modèles de caractéristiques extraits automatiquement et les modèles de caractéristiques initiaux (conçus par les développeurs des lignes de produits analysées). / The idea of Software Product Line (SPL) approach is to manage a family of similar software products in a reuse-based way. Reuse avoids repetitions, which helps reduce development/maintenance effort, shorten time-to-market and improve overall quality of software. To migrate from existing software product variants into SPL, one has to understand how they are similar and how they differ one from another. Companies often develop a set of software variants that share some features and differ in other ones to meet specific requirements. To exploit existing software variants and build a software product line, a feature model must be built as a first step. To do so, it is necessary to extract mandatory and optional features in addition to associate each feature with its name. Then, it is important to organize the mined and documented features into a feature model. In this context, our thesis proposes three contributions.Thus, we propose, in this dissertation as a first contribution a new approach to mine features from the object-oriented source code of a set of software variants based on Formal Concept Analysis, code dependency and Latent Semantic Indexing. The novelty of our approach is that it exploits commonality and variability across software variants, at source code level, to run Information Retrieval methods in an efficient way. The second contribution consists in documenting the mined feature implementations based on Formal Concept Analysis, Latent Semantic Indexing and Relational Concept Analysis. We propose a complementary approach, which aims to document the mined feature implementations by giving names and descriptions, based on the feature implementations and use-case diagrams of software variants. The novelty of our approach is that it exploits commonality and variability across software variants, at feature implementations and use-cases levels, to run Information Retrieval methods in an efficient way. In the third contribution, we propose an automatic approach to organize the mined documented features into a feature model. Features are organized in a tree which highlights mandatory features, optional features and feature groups (and, or, xor groups). The feature model is completed with requirement and mutual exclusion constraints. We rely on Formal Concept Analysis and software configurations to mine a unique and consistent feature model. To validate our approach, we applied it on three case studies: ArgoUML-SPL, Health complaint-SPL, Mobile media software product variants. The results of this evaluation validate the relevance and the performance of our proposal as most of the features and its constraints were correctly identified.

The software development continues to become more competitive and demanding, placing pressure on developers. Changes in the international political climate have resulted in shrinking military budgets, putting developers of defence software under further pressure. At present, systematic reuse is probably the most realistic way of addressing this pressure by improving software development productivity and quality. Software product line (SPL) engineering provides a comprehensive approach to systematic software reuse and is becoming widely accepted. The focus of this interpretive case study was ground station software development in a small multidisciplinary project-centric company which produces avionics systems for military aircraft. The purpose of the study was to investigate the potential implementation of systematic software reuse in the company. The study consisted of three phases, a literature study, a contextualisation and a set of field interviews, and used elements of the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Product Line Practice Framework to examine the suitability of SPL engineering for the company. The findings of the study highlight the potential challenges that SPL engineering poses for the company, and emphasise how the company's project-centric structure could impede its implementation of systematic software reuse. / Computing / M.Sc. (Information Systems)