Using Multi-Level Interfaces to Improve Analyses of Multi Product Lines

Software product lines (SPLs) enable an efficient development of similar programs based on a common code base. Although the number of SPLs in practice increases, the development and maintenance of an SPL is still challenging. In detail, a developer has to consider a huge amount of variability in each step of the development cycle that can become unmanageable. Therefore, multi software product lines (MPLs) were introduced that divide this variability in smaller more manageable parts. However, as result, the dependency between these SPLs becomes challenging as well as the analysis that should ensure the correctness of the whole systems. We propose multi-level interfaces that consist of a set of interfaces that encapsulate the modeling level, the implementation level as well as the behavioral level between cooperating software product lines. Using these interfaces, we want to investigate whether it is possible to simplify analyses according to these different levels so that we do not need the knowledge about the whole MPL. Preliminary results show that multi-level interfaces facilitate the domain comprehension for the developer, and reduce the complexity of product-line analyses. We present an overview of hypotheses and research methods as well as a concrete working plan to investigate multi-level interfaces in the software product-line lifecycle.