Software product line engineering for consumer electronics : Keeping up with the speed of innovation
Herman Hartmann · University of Groningen research database (University of Groningen / Centre for Information Technology) · 2015
During the last decade consumer electronics products have changed radically. Traditionally these products were used for a few dedicated tasks, and were implemented through hardware. Nowadays, these products are used for a variety of tasks and are largely implemented through software. Furthermore there is an increasing amount of variants needed to serve the market and a continuous pressure on development cost, quality, and time-to-market. These trends have drastically changed the way that software product lines for these products are being developed. This thesis shows that nowadays it is unfeasible for an individual company to develop the software on its own and consequently consumer electronics products are built using software components from a large variety of specialized firms. For developing the software that is embedded in these products, the software supply chain is the dominant industry structure. To support applications from third parties, an ecosystem centric approach is used. This thesis continues with solutions for managing the variability in a software supply chain. Modelling approaches are introduced to model multiple product lines, to combine the variability of different suppliers, to automate the integration of components from different suppliers and to deal with large feature models. This thesis ends with solutions to address the challenge of ensuring a sufficient quality. Methods are introduced to improve the test efficiency by identifying which functions and variation points are most heavily used and to use this information during different phases of the test process. Finally, the testing of highly innovative products is discussed.