Generating graphical user interfaces for software product lines: A constraint-based approach

Abstract: Due to a high competitive pressure on the global software market, in many areas the software industry is moving from hand crafting to semi-automatic or automat-ic software construction based on Software Product Lines (SPL). Techniques to auto-mate the construction of software products from SPLs are widely available. These can handle variability in source code artifacts but they are inappropriate to handle variabili-ty in Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). The main reason is that they are not designed to handle such fine grained configurations as they are required to configure GUI frame-works or toolkits. To nevertheless employ them in GUI generation tasks is complex and time consuming. However, in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community ap-proaches to develop GUIs in a model-based manner and with constraint-based tech-niques are worked on that help automate the construction of GUIs. Therefore, the main hypothesis of the proposed research is that constraint-based GUIs techniques are a well suited basis for reducing the customization effort of generated GUIs of SPLs. The pa-per proposes a research plan to employ these new HCI techniques in generating GUIs for SPLs.