Forschungsthemen
[DA] Evolution in Feature-Oriented Model-Based Software Product Line Engineering
A software product line (SPL) is a set of software-intensive systems sharing a common, managed set of features that satisfy the specific needs of a particular market segment or mission and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way. In addition to the shared core assets, every system of a SPL has features that are specific to the system and that are not shared by all other systems (often called products) of the SPL. To express this variability, variability modelling is used to describe the different features available in an SPL and their interdependencies. In the Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD) community a widely used approach for variability modelling are feature models.
Feature-based variability modelling resides in the problem space whereas the realisation of features is part of the solution space. To instantiate products from an SPL, feature realisations in the solution space have to be configured according to the presence of the features in a variant model; that is, a concrete selection of features from a feature model that describes a product of the SPL. This requires a mapping between features from a feature model and solution-space models or modelling artefacts that realise features (or combinations of those). This work should focus on model-driven development of SPLs and solution-space models that are expressed by means of Ecore-based metamodels. To achieve the required mappings, the tool FeatureMapper (available at http://featuremapper.org) has been proposed, which allow for creating mappings between features from feature models and solution-space models.
This thesis investigates the different issues that arise when feature models and solution-space models that are referenced from those mappings change. From that point, dedicated means for refactoring feature-oriented model-based SPLs are to be conceptualised and implemented in the FeatureMapper SPL tool so that broken mappings are prevented and the validity of all possible products of the SPL is still ensured.
Betreuer: Florian Heidenreich