Exploiting software product lines to develop cloud computing applications

With the advance of the Cloud Computing paradigm, new challenges in terms of models, tools, and techniques to support developers to design, build and deploy complex software systems that make full use of the cloud technology arise. In the heterogeneous scenario of this new paradigm, the development of applications using cloud services becomes hard, and the software product lines (SPL) approach is potentially promising for this context since specificities of the cloud platforms, such as services heterogeneity, pricing model, and other aspects can be catered as variabilities to core features. In this perspective, this paper (i) proposes a seamless adaptation of the SPL-based development to include important features of cloud-based applications, and (ii) reports the experience of developing HW-CSPL, a SPL for the Health Watcher (HW) System, which allows citizens to register complaints and consult information regarding the public health system of a city. Several functionalities of this system were implemented using different Cloud Computing platforms, and run time specificities of this application deployed on the cloud were analyzed, as well as other information such as change impact and pricing.