A Model-Driven Approach to the Development of Heterogeneous Software Product Lines

Software product line engineering is dedicated to planned reuse of software components based upon a common platform, from which single products may be derived. The common platform consists of different types of artefacts like requirements, specifications, architecture definitions, source code, and so forth. Only recently, research projects have been started dealing with model-driven development of software product lines. So far, the resulting tools can only handle one type of artefact at the same time. In this paper, requirements, concepts and limitations of tool support for heterogeneous model-driven software product line engineering are discussed. As a proof of concept, an extension to the toolchain FAMILE is presented, which supports mapping of features to different types of artefacts in heterogeneous model-driven software projects at the same time. Keywords–software product lines; model-driven development; negative variability; feature models; heterogeneity.