A tool environment for quality assurance of delta-oriented model-based SPLs
Christopher Pietsch, Dennis Reuling, Udo Kelter, Timo Kehrer · 2017
With the advent of model-driven engineering, software product line (SPL) technologies must be able to generate models as instances of a model-based SPL (MBSPL). Delta modeling is a variability mechanism which can be easily adopted for MBSPLs. The idea is to generate products by applying one or several deltas onto a core model. Hence, the main task during SPL implementation is to develop a set of deltas and to maintain several kinds of interrelations, e.g. dependencies and conflicts, in order to be able to generate all products of a MBSPL upon request. The resulting network of deltas is often complex and hard to maintain without appropriate tool support. This paper presents a tool environment for quality assurance in delta-oriented MBSPLs supporting the identification and elimination of design flaws in a network of deltas based on the principles of quality metrics and refactoring. We build upon previous work on the integration of model versioning tools with delta-oriented development of MBSPLs. Our solution is agnostic of the modeling language and may be easily extended by additional quality metrics and refactorings. We illustrate our approach using a delta-oriented MBSPL from the automation domain.