Case study: Feature Models for Component Selection in Mobile Applications
Christer Thörn · Jönköping University Publications (Jönköping University) · 2009
The mobile applications domain is variability intensive and characterized by deployment of applications on a variety of mobile handsets and operating systems, while maintaining a short development cycle. The circumstances lend themselves well to software product line approaches and similar qualified software reuse approaches. This report describes the experiences and results of using feature modeling to structure, document, visualize, and disseminate information about reusable assets with a mobile applications developer. It details the challenges met in finding tools and approaches supporting a large scale model, developed and used in an organization that is geographically distributed, and integrating the modeling benefits in the existing practices. Pairwise comparison is used as a means to prioritize and evaluate the quality of a feature model describing a component framework used for developing mobile applications. Indicators that give positive or negative contributions to the quality of the feature model are identified and lend support to the idea that the quality of a feature model can be influenced to better suit the intended uses and users of the model. The result of the efforts is a feature model, describing a component framework of reusable assets, contained in a wiki-style tool, and introduced in the organization’s practices while being minimally invasive.