Delta-oriented Architectural Variability Using MontiCore

TL;DR

This paper introduces ?-MontiArc, a delta modeling extension for the MontiArc architecture description language, enabling flexible variability management in software architecture development.

Contribution

It presents a novel integration of delta modeling into MontiArc, creating a domain-specific language for explicit architectural variability modeling.

Findings

?-MontiArc supports proactive, reactive, and extractive product line development.

Efficient derivation of variability-aware architectures using MontiCore language reuse.

Comparison shows advantages over annotative variability modeling.

Abstract

Modeling of software architectures is a fundamental part of software development processes. Reuse of software components and early analysis of software topologies allow the reduction of development costs and increases software quality. Integrating variability modeling concepts into architecture description languages (ADLs) is essential for the development of diverse software systems with high demands on software quality. In this paper, we present the integration of delta modeling into the existing ADL MontiArc. Delta modeling is a language-independent variability modeling approach supporting proactive, reactive and extractive product line development. We show how ?-MontiArc, a language for explicit modeling of architectural variability based on delta modeling, is implemented as domain-specific language (DSL) using the DSL development framework MontiCore. We also demonstrate how MontiCore's language reuse mechanisms provide efficient means to derive an implementation of ?-MontiArc tool implementation. We evaluate ?-Monti-Arc by comparing it with annotative variability modeling.