An Integrated Software Management Tool for Adopting Software Product Lines

Abstract

Software product line engineering has become widely known that it provides software organization with tremendous profits through systematical reuse to a number of organizations that require producing various and similar kinds of software products. However, when adopting software product lines, it has been reported that there are several challenges, e.g., the shortage of procedural support for application engineering, and original reasons of complexity and implicit properties for variability management. In order to address these major problems, an integrated tool support is required to guide software product line engineering process. The integrated software management tool for adopting software product lines, called "ISMT4SPL" can offer beneficial traceability among the artifacts created from domain engineering and application engineering. Furthermore, all the artifacts could consistently be managed by explicit representation of the relationship between artifacts generated at each software development phase by ISMTSPL. ISMT4SPL would contribute to adopting and guiding software product lines into the organizations that demand the seamless introduction of systematic reuse since the ISMT4SPL is helpful to manage variability by delivering the method that can generate a flexible and automatic variability model, which reduces complexity for managing a number of variation points and variants. In addition, consistency between all the artifacts would reduce confusion and quality problems by removing mismatches among them.