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. |