(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2014-05-29) Fernández Amoros, David José; Heradio Gil, Rubén; Cerrada Somolinos, José Antonio; Cerrada Somolinos, Carlos
A software product line is an engineering approach to efficient development of software product portfolios. Key to the success of the approach is to identify the common and variable features of the products and the interdependencies between them, which are usually modeled using feature models. Implicitly, such models also include valuable information that can be used by economic models to estimate the payoffs of a product line. Unfortunately, as product lines grow, analyzing large feature models manually becomes impracticable. This paper proposes an algorithm to compute the total number of products that a feature model represents and, for each feature, the number of products that implement it. The inference of both parameters is helpful to describe the standarization/parameterization balance of a product line, detect scope flaws, assess the product line incremental development, and improve the accuracy of economic models. The paper reports experimental evidence that our algorithm has better runtime performance than existing alternative approaches.
(MDPI, 2014-06-18) Pérez Morago, Héctor José; Adán, Antonio; Heradio Gil, Rubén; Fernández Amoros, David José
To compete in the global marketplace, manufacturers try to differentiate their products by focusing on individual customer needs. Fulfilling this goal requires that companies shift from mass production to mass customization. Under this approach, a generic architecture, named product platform, is designed to support the derivation of customized products through a configuration process that determines which components the product comprises. When a customer configures a derivative, typically not every combination of available components is valid. To guarantee that all dependencies and incompatibilities among the derivative constituent components are satisfied, automated configurators are used. Flexible product platforms provide a big number of interrelated components, and so, the configuration of all, but trivial, derivatives involves considerable effort to select which components the derivative should include. Our approach alleviates that effort by speeding up the derivative configuration using a heuristic based on the information theory concept of entropy.
