Quality attribute modeling and quality aware product configuration in software product lines

In software product line engineering, the customers mostly concentrate on the functionalities of the target product during product configuration. The quality attributes of a target product, such as security and performance, are often assessed until the final product is generated. However, it might be very costly to fix the problem if it is found that the generated product cannot satisfy the customers’ quality requirements. Although the quality of a generated product will be affected by all the life cycles of product development, feature-based product configuration is the first stage where the estimation or prediction of the quality attributes should be considered. As we know, the key issue of predicting the quality attributes for a product configured from feature models is to measure the interdependencies between functional features and quality attributes. The current existing approaches have several limitations on this issue, such as requiring real products for the measurement or involving domain experts’ efforts. To overcome these limitations, we propose a systematic approach of modeling quality attributes in feature models based on domain experts’ judgments using the analytic hierarchical process (AHP) and conducting quality aware product configuration based on the captured quality knowledge. Domain experts’ judgments are adapted to avoid generating the real products for quality evaluation, and AHP is used to reduce domain experts’ efforts involved in the judgments. A prototype tool is developed to implement the concepts of the proposed approach, and a formal evaluation is carried out based on a large-scale case study.