Title：Product Line Architectures: Generating Members of a Product Line

Speaker：David M. Weiss (Avaya Labs Research)

Time：10:00am, June 10

Venue：Lecture room of SKLCS, Level 3 Building #5

 

In 1976 David Parnas defined a set of programs to be a program family “whenever it is worthwhile to study programs from the set by first studying the common properties of the set and then determining the special properties of the individual family members.” Extending this definition we define a software product line to be a family of products designed to take advantage of their common aspects and predicted variabilities.  Software product line engineering (SPLE) is now gaining ground in industry. (See http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/plp_hof.html ) The goals, as with other approaches to improving software development, are to improve the time to create new products, reduce the cost of creating new products, improve the quality of products, and improve a development organization’s ability to tailor its products to changing customer needs.

 

The family-oriented abstraction, specification, and translation (FAST) process for creating product lines is based on the assumption that narrowing the domain of interest leads to efficiency in software production by enabling reuse of requirements, architecture, components, and other work products. A key part of FAST is creating a decision model that is used to generate members of the product line by integrating commonalities and variabilities, architecture, and implementation. This talk will show how to create a decision model and will illustrate the ideas using the eXVantage product line of software test tools that is currently under joint development by Avaya Labs, Peking University, and CVIC Software. Much of the focus will be on how to define the product line in terms of commonalities and variabilities, and then use them to create an architecture that is the basis for generation o products.

 

David M. Weiss received the B.S. degree in Mathematics in 1964 from Union College, and the M.S. in Computer Science in 1974 and the Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981 from the University of Maryland. He is currently the Director of the Software Technology Research Department at Avaya Laboratories, whose purpose is to improve the effectiveness of software development in general and of Avaya’s software development processes in particular. In this latter capacity he heads the Avaya Resource Center for Software Technology. He has also worked as a programmer and as a mathematician. He is also a senior member of the IEEE and recently completed a term as associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

 

Dr. Weiss’s principal research interests are in the area of software engineering, particularly in software development processes and methodologies, software design, and software measurement. He is best known for his invention of the goal-question-metric approach to software measurement, his work on the modular structure of software systems, and his work in software product-line engineering as a co-inventor of the Synthesis process, and its successor the FAST process. He is co-author and co-editor of two books: Software Product Line Engineering, (David Weiss and Chi Tau Robert Lai), and Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers of David L. Parnas (David Weiss and Daniel Hoffman, eds.).