Authors:
Paulo Alexandre da Silva Costa
;
Fabiana Gomes Marinho
;
Rossana Maria de Castro Andrade
and
Thalisson Oliveira
Affiliation:
Federal University of Ceara, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Software Product Line, Context-awareness, Feature Model, Automatic Verifying Tool, Ubiquitous Software, Software Adaptation.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Tools, Techniques and Methodologies for System Development
Abstract:
Software Product Lines (SPLs) have been used to provide support to the development of context-aware applications,
which use context information to perform customized services aiming to satisfy users needs or
environment restrictions. In this scenario, feature models have been also used to guide product adaptation
process and to enable systematic reuse. However, a side effect of using those models is the accidental inclusion
of inconsistencies that may imply in several errors in the adapted products. Moreover, context-aware
applications are exposed to a contextual change flow, which increases the occurrence and effects of such erros.
Therefore, mechanisms to check the inconsistencies are necessary before they become errors in the adapted
product. Nevertheless, a manual checking is highly error prone. In particular, there are inconsistencies that can
be detected only when they arise due to a specific adaptation. For those reasons, it is essencial to identify errors
in the context-aware
feature model before they yield incorrect adapted products. In this work, we present
an Eclipse-based tool that supports the software engineer in the design of context-aware feature models and
provides a simulation process to allow anticipating inconsistencies related to the adaptations.
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