Abstract:
Software product line engineering (SPLE) is a paradigm, which promotes the production of families of software-intensive products that share a common domain, rather than individual systems development. This is achieved by embracing the ideas of mass customization and software reuse of core assets. SPLE focuses on exploiting similarities within a set of software products and efficiently manages the differences. This paper presents a bench mark for evaluating quality attributes important for practical use of software product line (SPL) tools, as well as results of the evaluation that apply to this benchmark. The evaluation focused on measuring the four quality attributes: Usability, Performance, Scalability, and Integration. The study was conducted experimentally and involved 10 feature-modelling tools. In order to know and get an insight on how well and to what extent these tools satisfy these quality attributes, four case studies of different sizes were used as basis for the experimentation. The results are to assist practitioners and researchers alike by providing a standard and empirical approach to evaluating product line tools in the future. It also identifies and recommends areas that need attention in future tools design in this kind of modelling.
Keywords: Benchmark, Dependency Management, Evaluation, Feature Modeling, Software Product Line Variability Models
