A Tool Set for Change Management and Feature Propagation within a Product Family Architecture

Poster and Demonstration

Students: Ping Chen, Akash Garg, Christopher Van der Westhuizen

Abstract: Currently, many modern software organizations develop closely related software products as single, unrelated efforts. As a result, many high-level design decisions are lost between products and reuse remains ineffective or limited to the code level. One solution is to create a generic design architecture, which is able to capture an entire family of closely related products, called a product line architecture (PLA). The PLA explicitly describes the common features shared by all the products as well as the points of variation among the individual products. Variation points are either optional (it is not required) or variant (it may take different forms in different products).

Bio: Ping H. Chen is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine. Ping graduated from UC Irvine Summa Cum Laude, specializing in Software Systems. He plans to continue his research in software engineering and software architectures. His past research includes managing the evolution of software product line architectures. In the future, he plans to investigate the link between requirements and software design/architectures, and provide tool support for automatically generating parts of the software architecture from the requirements. He has published his work in the International Conference on Software Maintanence.