Mélanie König

Thomas Georges, Marianne Huchard, Mélanie König et al.

Migrating a set of software variants into a software product line (SPL) is an expensive and potentially challenging endeavor. Indeed, SPL engineering can significantly impact a company's development process and often requires changes to established developer practices. The work presented in this paper stems from a collaboration with a Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) that decided to migrate its existing code base into an SPL. In this study, we conducted an in-depth evaluation of the company's current development processes and practices, as well as the anticipated benefits and risks associated with the migration. Key stakeholders involved in software development participated in this evaluation to provide insight into their perceptions of the migration and their potential resistance to change. This paper describes the design of the interviews conducted with these stakeholders and presents an analysis of the results. Among the qualitative findings, we observed that all participants, regardless of their role in the development process, identified benefits of the migration relevant to their own activities. Furthermore, our results suggest that an effective risk mitigation strategy involves keeping stakeholders informed and engaged throughout the process, preserving as many good practices as possible, and actively involving them in the migration to ensure a smooth transition and minimize potential challenges.

Mélanie König, Michel Leclère, Marie-Laure Mugnier et al.

We address the issue of Ontology-Based Data Access, with ontologies represented in the framework of existential rules, also known as Datalog+/-. A well-known approach involves rewriting the query using ontological knowledge. We focus here on the basic rewriting technique which consists of rewriting the initial query into a union of conjunctive queries. First, we study a generic breadth-first rewriting algorithm, which takes as input any rewriting operator, and define properties of rewriting operators that ensure the correctness of the algorithm. Then, we focus on piece-unifiers, which provide a rewriting operator with the desired properties. Finally, we propose an implementation of this framework and report some experiments.