TITLE:
An Interactive Method for Validating Stage Configuration
AUTHORS:
Abdelrahman Osman Elfaki, Somnuk Phon-Amnuaisuk, Chin Kuan Ho
KEYWORDS:
Software Product Line, Variability, Stage Configuration
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.3 No.6,
June
24,
2010
ABSTRACT: Software product Line (SPL) is an emerging methodology for developing software products. Stage-configuration is one the important processes applying to the SPL. In stage-configuration, different groups and different people make configuration choices in different stages. Therefore, a successful software product is highly dependent on the validity of stage-configuration process. In this paper, a rule-based method is proposed for validating stage-configuration in SPL. A logical representation of variability using First Order Logic (FOL) is provided. Five operations: validation rules, explanation and corrective explanation, propagation and delete-cascade, filtering and cardinality test are studied as proposed operations for validating stage-configuration. The relevant contributions of this paper are: implementing automated consistency checking among constraints during stage-configuration process based on three levels (Variant- to-variant, variant-to-variation point, and variation point-to-variation point), define interactive explanation and corrective explanation, define a filtering operation to guide the user within stage-configuration, and define (explicitly) delete-cascade validation.