Quality-driven software product lines

In software product line engineering, the customers mostly concentrate on the functionalities of the target product during product configuration. The quality attributes of a target product, such as security and performance, are often assessed until the final product is generated. However, it might be very costly to fix the problem if it is found that the generated product cannot satisfy the customers’ quality requirements. Several approaches have been proposed to deal with this issue, focusing on the assessment of a quality attribute of a product configuration to measure the impact on a quality attribute made by the set of functional variable features selected in a configuration. Nevertheless, these approaches are only interested in characterizing the relationships among quality attributes and product functionalities to provide useful information about predicting the quality of the target product, relying on the previous existence of the software components that provide such measures and values. Our approach provides a SPL that uses model-driven techniques to automate derivation of product line members, considering promotion of quality attributes during this process by means of software enterprise patterns. In concrete we provide the following contributions: i) a domain metamodel that enables defining functional scope of product line members, ii) a quality attributes variability model to handle definition of quality scope of product line members, iii) a Reference Architecture (characterization of software enterprise design patterns from the perspective of the quality attributes they promote or inhibit) to construct product line members that exposes explicit variation points related to quality attributes and their relationships with functional features, iv) and tool support based on a generation engine to automatically construct product line members, following the Reference Architecture constraints. An illustrative example based on a Project Management software product line is presented to demonstrate how the proposed approach works.