Extended UML stratecharts and product lines

Abstract

"The study of variability in software development has become increasingly important in recent years. The research areas in which this is involved range from software specialization to product lines. A common mechanism to represent the variability in a product line is by means of feature models. However, the relationship between these models and UML design models is not straightfoward. UML statecharts are extending introducing variability in their main components, so that the behavior of product lines can be specified. This contribution of this work is the proposal of a rule-based approach that defines a transformation strategy from extended statechats to concrete UML statechats. This is accomplished via the use of feature models, in order to describe the common and variant components, in such a way that, starting from different feature configurations and applying the rule-based method, concrete state machines corresponding to different products of a line can be obtained." [Abstract]