Supporting Awareness during Collaborative and Distributed Configuration of Multi Product Lines

Today´s large-scale software systems are frequently based on system-of-systems architectures comprising multiple heterogeneous systems. Multi product lines have been presented as an approach to ease their development through systematic reuse. In multi product lines different users and teams are involved in product derivation. Users configure the involved product lines in a collaborative and distributed manner. It is challenging to ensure awareness regarding the configuration choices of users configuring related product lines in such a setting. We present a tool-supported approach that aims at increasing awareness by discovering dependencies and sharing configuration information during the collaborative and distributed product derivation of a multi product line. Our approach uses a bulletin board mechanism for sharing configuration information. It further implements a request-publish-subscribe mechanism for revealing possible dependencies and presenting the information relevant to the users´ specific configuration tasks. We evaluated the usability and utility of our approach in a two-phase study involving twelve industrial experts. The evaluation demonstrates the usability and utility of our approach to foster awareness regarding configuration dependencies during the distributed product derivation of a multi product line.