EASEL - Extensible Architecting Support Environment with Layers

Student: Scott A. Hendrickson, UC Irvine/ISR

Advisor: Richard N. Taylor, UC Irvine/ISR

Abstract: The essence of any modeling approach for product line architectures lies in its ability to express variability. Existing approaches do so by explicitly specifying variation points inside the architectural specification of the entire product line, usually with optional and alternative elements of some form. This, however, leads to a sizable mismatch between conceptual variability (i.e., the features through which architects logically view and interpret differences in product architectures) and actual variability (i.e., the modeling constructs through which the logical differences must be expressed). EASEL contributes a new product line architecture modeling approach that unites the two. This approach uses change sets to group related architectural differences and relationships to govern which change set combinations are valid when composed into a particular product architecture. The result lifts modeling of variability out of modeling architectural structure, consolidates related variation points, and explicitly and separately manages their compatibilities.

Bio:

Scott A. Hendrickson is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has been a Research Intern at The Aerospace Corporation. His research interests lie in the areas of Software Engineering and Software Architecture.