From intentions to software design using an intentional software product line meta-model

Software Product Line Engineering is a paradigm to develop software which allows the reducing of development costs for each individual product. In this kind of engineering, a family of related products is built out of a common set of core assets. The common characteristics and differences between products are managed in a systematic way. These differences are called variabilities. The variations analysis and the impact of the choices made for a required product are the reason of the main effort to design a product from the product line. In this paper, we try to argue that it is difficult to fully benefit of the SPL if it remains at the software level. The paper proposes a move towards a description of software product line in intentional terms, i.e. intentions and strategies to achieve business goals. We present ISPL, the model to describe intentional Software Product Line. We try through this Meta-models to present the different concepts which we will use in our approach. Thereafter, we propose our process to show how to use this model. This process combines the use of maps, visual techniques for the modeling of product lines, specially features diagrams and Meta-models.