Evolving Delta-oriented Software Product Line Architectures

TL;DR

This paper introduces delta modeling as a unified formalism for representing architectural variability in software product lines, addressing evolution and complexity through refactoring techniques and empirical comparison.

Contribution

It presents delta modeling for architectural variability in space and time, along with refactoring methods to maintain model quality during evolution.

Findings

Delta modeling effectively captures architectural variability.

Refactoring techniques improve model maintainability.

Empirical case study demonstrates advantages over annotative variability modeling.

Abstract

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.