Ontological approach to derive product configurations from a Software Product Line Reference Architecture.

Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPL) based on reuse, claim to improve evolution, time to market and decrease software development costs. Concrete software products or systems, members of the SPL family, are derived by instantiating a generic Reference Architecture (RA), holding common and variant components. The construction of RA is a complex and costly task, as well as its usage for product derivation, due to the huge number of variants, essentially caused by non functional requirements variability. In consequence, the selection of an RA instance or Feasible Solution (FS), meeting RA constraints and customer requirements, is not straightforward. In this work RA is built by a bottom-up process from existing products; RA and its instances are represented by a non-directed connected graph. The HIS-RA Ontology also represents RA and captures Healthcare Integrated Information Systems (HIS) domain knowledge. Moreover, FS must be connected (the induced graph by FS in RA has no isolated components), consistent (it verifies consistency rules among FS components), and working (it meets domain functional (FR) and non functional (NFR) requirements). The main goal of this paper is to define a semiautomatic process (FFSP), to derive consistency rules using the HIS-RA Ontology built-in reasoning capabilities, to construct consistent, connected and working FS. Software quality is considered by FFSP in the traceability between FR and NFR, and it is specified by ISO/IEC 25010, to guarantee RA evolution and the overall concrete product configuration quality. FFSP is validated on a HIS domain a case study.