Analysis of Non-functional Properties in Software Product Lines: A Systematic Review

Software Product Lines (SPL) approach has been widely developed in academia and successfully applied in industry. Based on the selection of features, stakeholders can efficiently derive tailor-made programs satisfying different requirements. While SPL was very successful at building products based on identified features, achievements and preservation of many nonfunctional properties (NFPs) remain challenging. A knowledge how to deal with NFPs is still not fully obtained. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of NFPs analysis for SPL products, focusing on runtime NFPs. The goal of the paper is twofold: (i) to present an holistic overview of SPL approaches that have been reported regarding the analysis of runtime NFPs, and (ii) to categorize NFPs treated in the scientific literature regarding development of SPLs. We analyzed 36 research papers, and identified that system performance attributes are typically the most considered. The results also aid future research studies in NFPs analysis by providing an unbiased view of the body of empirical evidence and by guiding future research directions.