Authors:
Marcio H. G. Bera
;
Edson Oliveira Jr.
and
Thelma E. Colanzi
Affiliation:
State University of Maringá, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Component, Effectiveness, Empirical Evaluation, Product-line Architecture, SMarty, Software Product Line, UML, Variability Management.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Software Engineering
;
Tools, Techniques and Methodologies for System Development
Abstract:
Variability modeling is an essential activity for the success of software product lines. Although existing literature
presents several variability management approaches, there is no empirical evidence of their effectiveness
for representing variability at component level. SMarty is an UML-based variability management approach
that currently supports use case, class, activity, sequence and component models. SMarty 5.1 provides a fully
compliant UML profile (SMartyProfile) with stereotypes and tagged-values and a process (SMartyProcess)
with a set of guidelines on how to apply such stereotypes towards identifying and representing variabilities. At
component level, SMarty 5.1 provides only one stereotype, variable , which means that any classes of a
given component have variability. Such a stereotype is clearly not enough to represent the extent of variability
modeling in components, ports, interfaces and operations. Therefore, this paper presents how the improved
version (5.2) of SMar
ty can identify and represent variability on such component-related elements, as well as
an experimental study that provides evidence of the SMarty effectiveness.
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