Abstract

The difficulty of maintaining stability in requirements, architecture, design, etc in the presence of changing stakeholders’ needs is widely acknowledged. This has generated a number of research interests in the form of software application stability or adaptability. However, most of this research is focused on the solution space in the form of architectural stability and adaptability. Architectural stability refers to the extent to which software architecture is flexible enough to respond to changes in stakeholders’ requirements and operating environment. On the other hand, adaptive software is expected to change its behaviour during run-time. While adaptive software is expected to be self-adaptive with minimal human intervention, stable architectures need not be self-adaptive. Using a case study, we illustrate how representing and analysing contextual variability can be used to define and isolate context-independent functionality from that of context-dependent one in the problem-space. This is essentially to achieving overall application stability in the problem space which may induce stability in the solution space. This position paper proposes an approach to variability for software product-families that extends traditional product-family variability mechanisms to deal with context awareness. The approach is based on the identification of relevant relationships between context properties and user requirements on the one hand, and architectural variability types on the other; and the definition of design notations and principles for the representation and trade-off analysis between different variability types within a product-family architecture. In broad terms, the approach links requirements to software architectures using the product-family paradigm as the underlying organising principle. This is envisaged to provide context-aware product-family system developers a conceptual means to capture requirements and in linking such requirements to architectural design choices in the form variability point types. This will contribute to software systems design and management during development and subsequent evolution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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