Measuring Non-Functional Properties in Software Product Line for Product Derivation

A software product line (SPL) enables stakeholders to derive different software products for a domain while providing a high degree of reuse of their code units. Software products are derived in a configuration process by composing different code units. The configuration process becomes complex if SPLs contain hundreds of features. In many cases, a stakeholder is not only interested in functional but also in non-functional properties of a desired product. Because SPLs can be used in different application scenarios alternative implementations of already existing functionality are developed to meet special non-functional requirements, like restricted binary size and performance guarantees. To enable these complex configurations we discuss and present techniques to measure non-functional properties of software modules and use these values to compute SPL configurations optimized to the users needs.