In our paper "Realizing Software Process Lines: Insights and Experiences" (cf. link below), we evaluated a comprehensive process line which is implemented in Germany. We could identify several instruments serving the needs that process engineers have to make their processes variable and to keep them maintainable. However, we still lack in practical experiences from different context. Can you share your experience for this?
- What concepts do you use to implement process lines?
- What technologies and methods support process line engineering?
Beyond this, we're also interested in getting some information where you see the advantages and disadvantages of your respective approaches.
Conference Paper Realizing Software Process Lines: Insights and Experiences
One technology/method to support process lines is domain-specific languages. That means capturing variability space directly in a language and then all legal product variants can be specified with the langauge. This gives more flexibility than parameter lists, wizards or feature models and allows to use already known product concepts directly in models.
When it comes to industry practices, see a review of 20+ cases in SPLC 2005 paper: Defining Domain-Specific Modeling Languages to Automate Product Derivation: Collected Experiences. Proceedings of the 9th International Software Product Line Conference, H. Obbink and K. Pohl (Eds.) Springer-Verlag, LNCS 3714, pp. 198 – 209, 2005. (Published with permission from Springer-Verlag at: http://users.jyu.fi/~jpt/TolKelSPLC2005.pdf.
Juha-pekka Tolvanen answer is very informative and industry specific. The paper also is very well written.
Dear Juha-Pekka,
I now had the time to study your paper in detail. Thank you for the link. My question is, how did you deal with the evolution of the models? For process lines, evolution is a challenge, especially, if processes need some kind of compliance/certification, if changes transitively affect further elements. How is change propagated? How are derived (model) variants updated (automatically/manually)?
Best, Marco
Found a very interesting study by Carvalho et al., added another proposal, and added some new evidence myself ;) Is there more out there?
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-13036-1_11
Conference Paper SMartySPEM: A SPEM-Based Approach for Variability Management...
Conference Paper Development of Flexible Software Process Lines with Variabil...
Dear Marco,
Sorry for late response (perhaps researchgate sent notification for on you the question but I’ve missed it).
Models can evolve and be versioned (e.g. Git, SVN) as other artifacts. Since a change can influence transitively to many other elements as you mentioned, a unit of version should be the whole model rather than parts only. If we then add here collaboration having multiple developers editing the models, one solution that we propose is described in https://modeling-languages.com/smart-model-versioning/
If you know about the nature of evolution then you can implement support for it in the domain-specific language. To do this we should investigate the domain in more detail.
Yours,
Juha-Pekka
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