Leveraging Aspect-Connectors to Improve Stability of Product-Line Variabilities
Marcelo Oliveira Dias, Leonardo P. Tizzei, Cecília M. F. Rubira, Alessandro F. Garcia, Jaejoon Lee · UEA Digital Repository (University of East Anglia) · 2010
One of the design goals of Product Line Architectures (PLAs) is to remain stable while accommodating changes of stakeholder’s requirements. However, the stability of a PLA is largely dependent on how modularized are the decisions crosscutting multiple architectural variation points. Their scattered implementation often leads to a number of side effects, such as architecture-wide modifications. This paper proposes a novel component model to encapsulate architectural variation points inside aspect-connectors, called Connector-VPs. Our component model addresses limitations of emerging aspectoriented models, such as XPIs, which do not allow a modular implementation of crosscutting variability decisions in a PLA. The role of a Connector-VP is both binding aspectuallevel components to base-level ones, and isolating crosscutting decisions at architectural variation points. We have evaluated the PLA stability designed using our solution in the presence of heterogeneous evolutionary scenarios in the context of component-based PLAs. The results show that our solution tends to promote superior PLA resilience on these scenarios. Keywords-Component-based software development; AspectOriented Programming; Software Product Lines; Software Architecture; Architectural Variability;