Development of Flexible Software Process Lines with Variability Operations: A Longitudinal Case Study

Joachim Schramm, Patrick Dohrmann, Marco Kuhrmann

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Abstract

Context: Software processes evolve over time and several approaches were proposed to support the required flexibility. Yet, little is known whether these approaches sufficiently support the development of large software processes. A software process line helps to systematically develop and manage families of processes and, as part of this, variability operations provide means to modify and reuse pre-defined process assets.
Objective: Our goal is to evaluate the feasibility of variability operations to support the development of flexible software process lines.
Method: We conducted a longitudinal study in which we studied 5 variants of the V-Modell XT process line for 2 years.
Results: Our results show the variability operation instrument feasible in practice. We analyzed 616 operation exemplars addressing various customization scenarios, and we found 87 different operation types contributed by 3 metamodel variants developed by different teams in different contexts.
Conclusions: Although variability operations are only one instrument among others, our results suggest this instrument useful to implement variability in real-life software process lines.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
Number of pages10
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Publication date27. Apr 2015
Article number13
ISBN (Electronic) 978-1-4503-3350-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 27. Apr 2015
Event19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering - Nanjing, China
Duration: 27. Apr 201529. Apr 2015

Conference

Conference19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
Country/TerritoryChina
CityNanjing
Period27/04/201529/04/2015

Keywords

  • software process
  • software process lines
  • variability operations
  • longitudinal study

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