User profiles for context-aware reconfiguration in software product lines

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are a mechanism to capture families of closely related software systems by modeling commonalities and variability. Although user customization has a growing importance in software systems and is a vital sales argument, SPLs currently only allow user customization at deploy-time. In this paper, we extend the notion of context-aware SPLs by means of user profiles, containing a linearly ordered set of preferences. Preferences have priorities, meaning that a low priority preference can be neglected in favor of a higher prioritized one. We present a reconfiguration engine checking the validity of the current configuration and, if necessary, reconfiguring the SPL while trying to fulfill the preferences of the active user profile. Thus, users can be assured about the reconfiguration engine providing the most suitable configuration for them. Moreover, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using a case study based on existing car customizability.