Empirical Studies on Aspect and Component-based Product Line Architecture Evolution

• Grant number: 12/17835-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: March 01, 2013
• End date: May 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computing Methodologies and Techniques
• Principal Investigator: Cecília Mary Fischer Rubira
• Grantee: Leonardo Pondian Tizzei
• Host Institution: Instituto de Computação (IC). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Generally, software product lines are complex because they encompass the development of a set of systems that share common assets. Product line architectures are essential artifacts that help handling this complexity by abstracting implementation details. The integration of aspect concepts to the existing methods and techniques aims at supporting the evolution of product line architectures. A recent work extends a method for designing component-based product line architectures called FArM by using aspects and, hence called AO-FArM. The COSMOS*-VP technique is another recent work that extends a component-based implementation technique called COSMOS* by using aspects.Preliminary evaluations have shown that the integration of aspect concepts brings benefits to these methods and techniques, but these evaluations have limitations. The AO-FArM method has not been compared to the FArM method under the evolution attributes point of view. Regarding the studies that compare implementation techniques, they used only one product line thus limiting the results generalization. Another limitation of these studies is that only COSMOS* and COSMOS*-VP techniques were compared and COSMOS*-VP was not compared against an ad hoc integration of component and aspects. This project aims at exploring whether the integration of aspects brings benefits or not by means of two types of empirical studies: (i) studies that compare methods for designing component-based product line architectures with and without aspects and (ii) studies that compare techniques for implementing architectures, namely COSMOS*-VP, COSMOS*, ad hoc integration of component and aspects.