Software product line engineering with the UML: Deriving products

Abstract

Software product line engineering introduces two new dimensions into the traditional engineering of software-based systems: the variability modeling and the product derivation. The variability gathers characteristics that differ from one product to another, while the product derivation is defined as a complete process of building products from the product line. Software Product Line Engineering with the UML has received a lot of attention in recent years. However most of these works only concern variability modeling in UML static models and few works concern behavioral models. In addition, there is very little research on product derivation. This chapter investigates the product derivation in the context of the product line engineering with the UML. First, a set of extensions are proposed to model product line variability in two types of UML models: class diagrams (the static aspect) and sequence diagrams (the behavioral aspect). Then we formalize product derivation using a UML model transformation. An algorithm is given to derive a static model for a product and an algebraic approach is proposed to derive product-specific statecharts from the sequence diagrams of the product line. Two simple case studies are presented, based on a Mercure product line and the banking product line, to illustrate the overall process, from the modeling of the product line to the product derivation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.