Comparing Configuration Approaches for Dynamic Software Product Lines

Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs) are Software Product Lines (SPLs) in which the configuration may occur at runtime. DSPL approaches provide means for modeling variability as well as configuring the product according to its runtime context and/or non-functional requirements (NFRs) satisfaction. In this paper, we present a Requirements Engineering (RE) approach for DSPL, ConG4DaS (Contextual Goal models For Dynamic Software product lines), which provides: (i) models for capturing variability with goals, NFRs, contexts and the relationship between them; and (ii) a configuration process that takes contexts, NFRs and their priority and interactions into account. We have used simulation based assessment to compare ConG4DaS with another approach, REFAS (Requirements Engineering For self-Adaptive Software systems), with respect to the satisfaction level of the highest priority softgoal. For the comparison, we modeled two DSPL examples and simulated different scenarios where reconfiguration is necessary. Next, we compared the configurations selected by the approaches with respect to overall NFRs' satisfaction. The results showed that ConG4DaS, which uses utility function in the configuration process, selects configurations that better satisfy NFRs compared to REFAS, which uses constraint programming.