Experience on Software Product Line Domain Engineering for Mobile Computing

Domain Engineering (DE) is crucial to determine limits and feasibility of a Software Product Line (SPL), or family of similar products or systems sharing common and reusable elements or core assets in a domain or market sector. The main goal of this work is to present an industrial experience centered on the PLScope phase of DE, considering a Quality-driven Domain Engineering Process (Q-DEP), using a bottom-up strategy based on the study of the enterprise existing products, to reduce the effort in the subsequent DE phases. This approach is more low cost and light weighted than the proactive (top-down) approach; however, both are recommended for SPL development by the ISO/IEC 26550 and Software Engineering Institute frameworks. Q-DEP has been applied successfully on a small-medium size Mobile Computing (MC) consortium that wanted to migrate to SPL. However, SPL development requires a huge engineering effort to build its main reusable artifact, the Reference Architecture (RA), or instantiable schema to derive concrete SPL products. RA is a highly abstract software architecture defined by components and connectors, holding placeholders to perform instantiation to derive new products. MC is facing increasing software demand, being a development based on information technology, fast multimedia transmission via computer or any wireless connected mobile device. MC does not deal with complex systems, but it must withstand very fast development/delivery issues and priority quality requirements such as efficiency, portability, usability and availability. Developers’ teams work independently and loose effort in programming resources. The MC consortium wanted to build a first asset repository, to start migrating to SPL; construction of RA was not planned at the project start. However, the domain and existing products study was crucial to build the first asset repository, and our bottom-up process reduced the effort of the subsequent phases, hence RA was relatively easy to build