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Software Product Line Engineering Foundations Principles And Techniques

Chatbots become quite hyped in recent times as they can provide an intuitive and easy-to-use natural language human-computer interface. Nevertheless, they are not yet widespread in enterprises. Corresponding application areas for collaboration at digital workplaces are lacking and prior research contributions on this topic are limited. In this research paper, we aim at surveying the state of the art as well as showing future research topics. Thus, we conducted a structured literature review and showed that only few first research contributions exist. We also outline current potentials and objectives of chatbot applications. In the discussion of the results of our structured literature review, we show that research gaps are present. To tackle the research gaps, we derive open research questions.

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How May I Help You? – State of the Art and Open Research Questions for Chatbots at the Digital Workplace

The lack of mature tool support is one of the main reasons that make the industry to be reluctant to adopt Software Product Line (SPL) approaches. A number of systematic literature reviews exist that identify the main characteristics offered by existing tools and the SPL phases in which they can be applied. However, these reviews do not really help to understand if those tools are offering what is really needed to apply SPLs to complex projects. These studies are mainly based on information extracted from the tool documentation or published papers. In this paper, we follow a different approach, in which we firstly identify those characteristics that are currently essential for the development of an SPL, and secondly analyze whether the tools provide or not support for those characteristics. We focus on those tools that satisfy certain selection criteria (e.g., they can be downloaded and are ready to be used). The paper presents a state of practice with the availability and usability of the existing tools for SPL, and defines different roadmaps that allow carrying out a complete SPL process with the existing tool support.

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Software Product Line Engineering: A Practical Experience

Software reuse lowers development costs and improves the quality of software systems. Two strategies are common: clone & own (copying and adapting a system) and platform-oriented reuse (building a configurable platform). The former is readily available, flexible, and initially cheap, but does not scale with the frequency of reuse, imposing high maintenance costs. The latter scales, but imposes high upfront investments for building the platform, and reduces flexibility. As such, each strategy has distinctive advantages and disadvantages, imposing different development activities and software architectures. Deciding for one strategy is a core decision with long-term impact on an organization’s software development. Unfortunately, the strategies’ costs are not well-understood - not surprisingly, given the lack of systematically elicited empirical data, which is difficult to collect. We present an empirical study of the development activities, costs, cost factors, and benefits associated with either reuse strategy. For this purpose, we combine quantitative and qualitative data that we triangulated from 26 interviews at a large organization and a systematic literature review covering 57 publications. Our study both confirms and refutes common hypotheses on software reuse. For instance, we confirm that developing for platform-oriented reuse is more expensive, but simultaneously reduces reuse costs; and that platform-orientation results in higher code quality compared to clone & own. Surprisingly, refuting common hypotheses, we find that change propagation can be more expensive in a platform, that platforms can facilitate the advancement into innovative markets, and that there is no strict distinction of clone & own and platform-oriented reuse in practice.

An empirical analysis of the costs of clone- and platform-oriented software reuse

Conversational agents (CA), i.e. software that interacts with its users through natural language, are becoming increasingly prevalent in everyday life as technological advances continue to significantly drive their capabilities. CA exhibit the potential to support and collaborate with humans in a multitude of tasks and can be used for innovation and automation across a variety of business functions, such as customer service or marketing and sales. Parallel to the increasing popularity in practice, IS researchers have engaged in studying a variety of aspects related to CA in the last few years, applying different research methods and producing different types of theories. In this paper, we review 36 studies to assess the status quo of CA research in IS, identify gaps regarding both the studied aspects as well as applied methods and theoretical approaches, and propose directions for future work in this research area.

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On Conversational Agents in Information Systems Research: Analyzing the Past to Guide Future Work.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) play a critical role for supporting the development of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), since they allow geolocating users and the "things" or smart objects that constitute a CPS, providing a realistic vision in quasi real-time. This has increased the demand of developing web-based GIS applications to be deployed in the different devices and wearables of the CPS with short time-to-market. This demand and the fact that web-based GIS applications of CPS share many features and known variability justifies why they present the perfect setting to apply software product-lines engineering (SPLE). In this paper, we present the experience of developing a web-based GIS product line in the SME Enxenio, and the methodology applied to define the product line. In addition, we present the results obtained providing the GIS community with a reference SPL that is ready for its evolution and enrichment.

Web-based Geographic Information Systems SPLE: Domain Analysis and Experience Report

An Architecture for Software Engineering Gamification

The SME (Small and medium-sized enterprise) Enxenio has developed many web-based Geographic Information Systems within the last decade. Since the demand for GIS is increasing, Enxenio decided to apply Software Product Line Engineering to this domain to facilitate the development of complete web-based GIS applications, increasing their quality, improving the time-to-market and, at the same time, reducing their cost to its clients. This demo shows the resulting tool of this process, which is able to generate the source code of a web-based GIS from the set of desired features and the definition of its data model. This tool can be run within a web browser and the derivation engine in charge of generating the code is based on the scaffolding technique.

Scaffolding and in-browser generation of web-based GIS applications in a SPL tool

In the last years there has been a continuous growth in functionality of geographic information systems GIS resulting in many different software artifacts. Even though each GIS is used in different areas with different objectives, they all share many features and requirements and therefore it is possible to apply techniques based on intensive software reuse, such as software product line engineering SPLE. Although there has been much research on software product line engineering in the last years, the definition of a software product line for the domain of geographic information systems has not been undertaken.

In this work we identify the requirements and functionalities of a generic product for a web-based geographic information system, grouping them into commonalities that allow us to reuse many software artifacts, and variabilities that allow use to configure different products. Then, we define the functional and technological architecture of a software product line that uses current technologies for web-based application development. Finally, we design a tool to configure and assemble the components to generate the possible products. The resulting platform is flexible enough to adapt each product to the specific needs of each customer.

A Reusable Software Architecture for Geographic Information Systems Based on Software Product Line Engineering

Web applications development involves managing a high diversity of files and resources like code, pages or style sheets, implemented in different languages. To deal with the automatic generation of custom-made configurations of web applications, industry usually adopts annotation-based approaches despite the majority of studies encourage the use of composition-based approaches to implement Software Product Lines. Recent work tries to combine both approaches to get the complementary benefits. However, technological companies are reticent to adopt new development paradigms such as feature-oriented programming or aspect-oriented programming. Moreover, it is extremely difficult, or even impossible, to apply these programming models to web applications, mainly because of their multilingual nature, since their development involves multiple types of source code (Java, Groovy, JavaScript), templates (HTML, Markdown, XML), style sheet files (CSS and its variants, such as SCSS), and other files (JSON, YML, shell scripts). We propose to use the Common Variability Language as a composition-based approach and integrate annotations to manage fine grained variability of a Software Product Line for web applications. In this paper, we (i) show that existing composition and annotation-based approaches, including some well-known combinations, are not appropriate to model and implement the variability of web applications; and (ii) present a combined approach that effectively integrates annotations into a composition-based approach for web applications. We implement our approach and show its applicability with an industrial real-world system.

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Alejandro Cortiñas

Papers

Web-based Geographic Information Systems SPLE: Domain Analysis and Experience Report

An Architecture for Software Engineering Gamification

Scaffolding and in-browser generation of web-based GIS applications in a SPL tool

A Reusable Software Architecture for Geographic Information Systems Based on Software Product Line Engineering

Integrating the Common Variability Language with Multilanguage Annotations for Web Engineering