A Product Line Perspective for Quality Reuse of Development Frameworks for Distributed Transactional Applications

Flexibility, autonomy, distribution and openness of the modern computing systems are properties which expand the spectrum of interactions possible among system components. Moreover these properties tend to impose more rigorous quality requirements on software development. To ensure the quality of distributed applications two notions have already been introduced: concurrency control and fault-tolerance. These notions are present and refined in so-called advanced transactional frameworks. All these frameworks have different interpretations of these two notions because they try to solve different issues. Engineering from scratch such a framework is a complex task which will achieve a low level result, if not supported by a quality oriented approach. This paper solves this issue by introducing a product line perspective founded on the semantic analysis of the variabilities and commonalities of the ACID (atomicity, isolation, durability and consistency) properties. Varying and composing ACID properties in a disciplined way is in our opinion a key issue to increase quality and quality reuse in the development of advanced transactional frameworks. For this our approach allows the elicitation of the requirements of the advanced transactional frameworks product line using the "DRET" template.