Automating Software Product Line Development: A Repository-Based Approach

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) focuses on the reuse of already available software assets aiming better productivity and quality. By adopting software product line (SPL) practices, an organization is able to develop a family of products, each one targeting a particular market segment or platform. In this context, this paper presents a repository that allows the management of CBSE and SPL assets and the automated product derivation. Our SPL repository supports registration of several SPLs and their related feature models, reference architectures and components. Furthermore, the proposed work provides an application assembly mechanism where users select features and the repository selects the architecture and the set of assets allowing product derivation. In order to verify the feasibility of our approach, we apply it to the variability management of a Digital TV middleware.