Managing Emerging Configuration Dependencies in Multi Product Lines

Large-scale software-intensive systems often consist of multiple heterogeneous and loosely coupled systems, which work together to form a system of systems (SoS). The individual systems often represent configurable units that need be adapted to customer requirements. In such multi product line environments, configuration dependencies between the product lines need to be discovered and enforced. Based on an analysis of the SoSs of our industry partners in the domains of medical systems and industrial automation, we identify several types of configuration dependencies between product lines. In particular, we point out the importance of emerging dependencies, which are not known in advance, but are detected in the course of the configuration process. For handling such emerging dependencies, we developed tool extensions to the DOPLER tool suite that provide support for the distributed configuration of multi product lines by multiple users and that support the inference of dependencies from emerging dependencies by observing user actions. We conducted a preliminary evaluation to assess our tool-supported approach. Our extensible set of dependency types turned out to be suitable for modeling configuration dependencies between product lines in the study system. The evaluation further showed the usefulness of the tool for capturing emerging dependencies by multiple users during distributed configuration.