Integration of Quality Attributes in Software Product Line Development

Abstract

Different approaches for building modern software systems in complex and open environments have been proposed in the last few years. Some efforts try to apply Software Product Line (SPL) approach to take advantage of the massive reuse for producing software systems that share a common set of features. In general quality assurance is a crucial activity for success in software industry, but it is even more important when talking about Software Product Lines since the intensive reuse of assets makes the quality attributes (a measurable physical or abstract property of an entity) of the assets to be transmitted to the whole SPL scope. However, despite the importance that quality has in software product line development, most of the methodologies being applied in Software Product Line Development focus only on managing the commonalities and variability within the product line and not giving support to the non--¿ functional requirements that the products must fit. The main goal of this master final work is to introduce quality attributes in early stages of software product line development processes by means of the definition of a production plan that, on one hand, integrates quality as an additional view for describing the extension of the software product line and, on the other hand introduces the quality attributes as a decision factor during product configuration and when selecting among design alternatives. Our approach has been defined following the Model--¿ Driven Software Development paradigm. Therefore all the software artifacts defined had its correspondent metamodels and the processes defined rely on automated model transformations. Finally in order to illustrate the feasibility of the approach we have integrated the quality view in an SPL example in the context of safety critical embedded systems on the automotive domain.