VULCAN: A Workbench for Feature-Oriented Product Line Software Development

Software developers, especially embedded system developers, are faced with fierce market competition with: diverse market needs, ever increasing number of features, rapidly changing technologies, and time-to-market pressure. To survive in this environment and enhance their competitiveness in the market, developers are searching for methods and tools to increase their productivity and improve software quality. As a result, software product line engineering (SPLE) methods and support tools have gained popularity ([1, 2]). There are several methods/tools ([3, 4, 5, 6, 7]) that support SPLE. Existing methods such as [3, 4, 5] provide mechanisms for instantiating products from assets that are created manually. Other methods ([6, 7]) provide languages for describing product line architectures and integration mechanisms, but development of assets need to be done manually. With the existing method ([3, 4, 5, 6, 7]), the behavior of systems is not visible thus it is difficult to understand and maintain the systems. To address this limitation, we have developed a new CASE tool, called VULCAN, that supports the entire feature-oriented product line software development life cycle ([8]). VULCAN uses parameterization of assets with features and instantiation of applications through feature selection as others. However, it also provides architecture models/patterns that make the behavior of systems visible; user interface, control, and computation components are separated in architecture models, and control