Towards Feature-Oriented Variability Reconfiguration in Dynamic Software Product Lines

Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL) provides a new paradigm for developing self-adaptive systems with the principles of software product line engineering. DSPL emphasizes variability analysis and design at development time and variability binding and reconfiguration at runtime, thus requires some kinds of variability mechanisms to map high-level variations (usually represented by features) to low-level implementation and support runtime reconfiguration. Existing work on DSPL usually assumes that variation features can be directly mapped to coarse-grained elements like services, components or plug-ins, making the methods hard to be applied for traditional software systems. In this paper, we propose a feature-oriented method to support runtime variability reconfiguration in DSPLs. The method introduces the concept of role model, an intermediate level between feature variations and implementations to improve their traceability. On the other hand, the method involves a reference implementation framework based on dynamic aspect mechanisms to implement the runtime reconfiguration. We illustrate the process of applying the proposed method with a concrete case study, which helps to validate the effectiveness of our method.