Development of an Architecture of an Integrated Analysis Framework for Change-Intensive Systems Based on Industry Needs

Successfully adopting Product Line Engineering (PLE) approaches in the context of software-intensive systems reduces overall development and maintenance costs, reduces time to market and leads to an overall improvement in product quality. The Software and System Product Line (SPL) community has provided a large number of analysis approaches and corresponding tools that aim to solve different analysis needs. These analysis needs arise throughout a product line life-cycle, ranging from initializing a new software product line from existing products, to improving an existing software product line. The aforementioned analysis tools, which are typically developed in the context of research studies and industrial collaborations, serve a specific purpose and are developed to fulfill a specific go al. Additionally, analysis practitioners gain an extensive understanding regarding the analysis tool capabilities, which goals it fulfills, which data formats are supported, what adaptations must be performed to integrate it with other analysis tools, and how the results should be interpreted. This information, which constitutes holistic knowledge, is rarely explicitly documented, making it hard to reuse existing analysis tools in different contexts to fulfill various goals. Furthermore, guided instructions for performing typical application scenarios are largely missing. Our work provides the following contributions: (i) to understand how organizations in industrial settings define goals in the context of SPL adoption, we study existing literature and provide an overview of our findings; (ii) we perform a mapping study with the aim of identifying and classifying existing analysis tools with respect to their applicability to different industrial settings; (iii) we introduce a classification system for describing existing analysis approaches, and possible combinations of analysis tools; (iv) we present a reference architecture for an integrated analysis framework; and finally, (v) we validate our reference architecture by instantiating a prototypical toolchain from our framework.