Dr. Rossel-Cid, Pedro

Software Product Lines allow creating a set of applications that share a set of common features. This makes software product lines appropriate for implementing a family of software products when each stakeholder has different needs and requirements evolve constantly. In the case of emergency management, firefighters have begun using their own smartphones to collaborate and access information during emergencies. However, each firefighter role requires different information and the firefighters’ requirements are constantly evolving. We propose a well-defined process to help stakeholders in this domain specify the products they require, showing that it is possible to apply this software engineering process to extract collaborative requirements common to a set of applications. To confirm whether it was useful for real software implementation, we defined and implemented two applications for this domain. This paper presents the process used to systematically define the domain model and determine the domain scope, which may be used for other domains. We found the process to be appropriate for identifying features related to the domain and its collaborative aspects. The results are promising; the process allowed us to create two working applications which were positively received by two types of stakeholders.

Meshing tools are highly complex software for generating and managing geometrical discretizations. Due to their complexity, they have generally been developed by end users – physicists, forest engineers, mechanical engineers – with ad hoc methodologies and not by applying well established software engineering practices. Different meshing tools have been developed over the years, making them a good application domain for Software Product Lines (SPLs). This paper proposes building a domain model that captures the different domain characteristics such as features, goals, scenarios and a lexicon, and the relationships among them. The model is partly specified using a formal language. The domain model captures product commonalities and variabilities as well as the particular characteristics of different SPL products. The paper presents a rigorous process for building the domain model, where specific roles, activities and artifacts are identified. This process also clearly establishes consistency and completeness conditions. The usefulness of the model and the process are validated by using them to generate a software product line of Tree Stem Deformation (TSD) meshing tools. We also present Meshing Tool Generator, a software that follows the SPL approach for generating meshing tools belonging to the TSD SPL. We show how an end user can easily generate three different TSD meshing tools using Meshing Tool Generator.