Visual tool support for configuring and understanding software product lines

Abstract

Software product lines of industrial size can easily incorporate thousands of variation points. This scale of variability can become extremely complex to manage resulting in a product development process that bears significant costs. One technique that can be applied beneficially in this context is visualisation. Visualisation is widely used in software engineering and has proven useful to amplify human cognition in data intensive applications. Adopting this technique in software product line engineering can help stakeholders in supporting essential work tasks and in enhancing their understanding of large and complex product lines. This paper introduces a meta-model and accompanied research tool that employs visualisation techniques to support fundamental product line development tasks. The meta-model specifies major entities such as decisions, features, and components and relationships among them. We discuss which tasks can be supported based on the meta-model and show examples of how these tasks can be further enhanced by utilising interactive visualisation techniques implemented in our tool.