This respository contains all the resources and artifacts of the paper entitled Empirical analysis of the tool support for software product lines by the authors José Miguel Horcas, Mónica Pinto, and Lidia Fuentes, and submitted to the Journal Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM). Please clic on each part of the contents above to get detail information and the documentation of the artifacts and procedures to use them and replicate the experiments.
The paper presents empirical research in which we evaluate the degree of maturity of existing SPL tools to support variability modeling characteristics and SPL activities required by following 4 steps:
1. Cases studies requirements. We first identify the characteristics and activities currently essential for the development of SPLs, by selecting a sample of case studies in application domains with high variability.
2. State of the art of the existing tools for SPL. Secondly, we perform an exploratory study to analyze the current state of the art of SPL tools to identify which ones are available online, and are really usable for practitioners and the SPL community. The goal is to collect all possible tools related with SPL to check their status (available, working, updated, usable) before considering them to analysis.
3. Analysis of tool support for the different phases of the SPL process. Thirds, we analyze whether a subset of the existing tools support those characteristics and activities. We conclude that, with the current tool support, it is possible to develop a basic SPL approach. But tools present several limitations when dealing with complex variability requirements demanded by emergent application domains, such as non-boolean features or large configuration spaces.
4. Tooling Roadmaps for SPL processes. Finally, we identify a need for an integrated approach with appropriate tool support to completely cover all the activities and phases that are generally performed in SPLs. We propose different roadmaps to mitigate this problem, using the existing tools to partially or entirely support SPL activities, from variability modeling until product derivation.