Empirical assessment of two approaches for specifying software product line use case scenarios
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- 作者：Rodrigo Bonifácio ; Paulo Borba ; Cristiano Ferraz…
- 关键词：Usage scenarios ; Requirements engineering ; Software modularity ; Software product lines ; Experimentation in software engineering
- 刊名：Software & Systems Modeling
- 出版年：2017
- 出版时间：February 2017
- 年：2017
- 卷：16
- 期：1
- 页码：97-123
- 全文大小：
- 刊物类别：Computer Science
- 刊物主题：Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems; Programming Techniques; Software Engineering; Programming Languages, Compilers, Interpreters; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet);
- 出版者：Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- ISSN：1619-1374
- 卷排序：16
文摘
Modularity benefits, including the independent maintenance and comprehension of individual modules, have been widely advocated. However, empirical assessments to investigate those benefits have mostly focused on source code, and thus, the relevance of modularity to earlier artifacts is still not so clear (such as requirements and design models). In this paper, we use a multimethod technique, including designed experiments, to empirically evaluate the benefits of modularity in the context of two approaches for specifying product line use case scenarios: PLUSS and MSVCM. The first uses an annotative approach for specifying variability, whereas the second relies on aspect-oriented constructs for separating common and variant scenario specifications. After evaluating these approaches through the specifications of several systems, we find out that MSVCM reduces feature scattering and improves scenario cohesion. These results suggest that evolving a product line specification using MSVCM requires only localized changes. On the other hand, the results of six experiments reveal that MSVCM requires more time to derive the product line specifications and, contrasting with the modularity results, reduces the time to evolve a product line specification only when the subjects have been well trained and are used to the task of evolving product line specifications.