Evolving Delta-oriented Software Product Line Architectures
This addresses the need for architectural description languages to manage variability in software product lines, particularly for evolving systems, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing variability modeling concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of representing spatial and temporal variability in software architectures by presenting delta modeling as a uniform formalism, and it evaluates this approach through a case study comparing it with annotative variability modeling in the automotive domain.
Diversity is prevalent in modern software systems. Several system variants exist at the same time in order to adapt to changing user requirements. Additionally, software systems evolve over time in order to adjust to unanticipated changes in their application environment. In modern software development, software architecture modeling is an important means to deal with system complexity by architectural decomposition. This leads to the need of architectural description languages that can represent spatial and temporal variability. In this paper, we present delta modeling of software architectures as a uniform modeling formalism for architectural variability in space and in time. In order to avoid degeneration of the product line model under system evolution, we present refactoring techniques to maintain and improve the quality of the variability model. Using a running example from the automotive domain, we evaluate our approach by carrying out a case study that compares delta modeling with annotative variability modeling.