Component-Based Product Line Engineering with UML - Softcover

Atkinson, Colin; Bayer, Joachim; Bunse, Christian; Kamsties, Erik; Laitenberger, Oliver; Laqua, Roland; Muthig, Dirk; Peach, Barbara; Wust, Jurgen; Zettel, Jorg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201737914 ISBN 13: 9780201737912

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2001

Synopsis

Describes the KobrA method, which supports a model-driven, UML-based representation of components, and a product line approach to their development and evolution. Softcover.

About this title

About the Author

Colin Atkinson is an experienced OO consultant and acknowledged UML expert, having contributed to Platinum Technology's OOAD submission to the OMG (Object Management Group) and been a member of the UML integration task force.
He previously held the position of Assistant Professor of Engineering at the University of Houston, Clear Lake and was a researcher at NASA's Software Engineering Research Center in Houston. He is currently head of the KobrA method development team at the Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern, Germany and a professor of Software Engineering and leader of the Component Engineering group at the university of Kaiserslautern.
He is the author of *OO Reuse, Concurrency & Distribution* (AW 1991).

From the Back Cover

Component-based development promises to revolutionize the way in which software is developed and maintained. However, contemporary component technologies, such as COM+/.NET, EJB/J2EE and CORBA, only support components in the final, implementation-oriented stages of development, leaving the earlier stages of analysis and design to be organized in largely traditional, non-component oriented ways.

This book describes the KobrA method, which supports a model-driven, UML-based representation of components, and a product line approach to their development and evolution. This enables the benefits of component-based development to be realized throughout the software life-cycle, and allows the reusability of components to be significantly enhanced.

It will provide you with the techniques you need to:

• Develop a Model-Driven Architecture in which the key features of a system are described independently of specific implementation platforms
• Efficiently and verifiably transform models into code
• Systematically reuse COTS components in new applications
• Improve the quality of components and the systems assembled from them

Features:

• A running example which illustrates the key ideas of the method in an integrated way
• Appendices with the KobrA metamodel and process reference guide.

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Bringing the levels of reuse in software development into line with that in other engineering disciplines has been a long sought after but elusive goal of software engineering. In the last few years, however, new development paradigms have emerged which promise to radically change this situation, and allow software engineering to claim its rightful place in the family of engineering disciplines. Most prominent among them are component-based software development and product line engineering. At one end of the granularity spectrum, components represent reusable software building blocks that can be quickly and easily assembled into new systems, while at the other end of the spectrum product line engineering consolidates all the common parts of an organizationís range of products within a single, highly reusable software core.

Unfortunately, the exploitation of these paradigms for enterprise software development is frustrated by the lack of prescriptive, systematic methods for their application. Contemporary software methods that accommodate components or product lines typically do so either very late in the software life-cycle (in the case of components), or very early in the life-cycle (in the case of product lines). Few, if any, existing methods exploit the natural synergy between components and product lines at all stages and levels of development. This book presents a new method, known as KobrA, that aims to address this problem by offering a simple, prescriptive and systematic approach for component-based product line engineering across the full software life-cycle. It also leverages the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to support the two paradigms in a way that is compatible with most mainstream implementation and middleware technologies, including the leading component technologies. It therefore provides a foundation for a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach to software engineering.

A major goal of KobrA is to avoid the feature overload found in many other methods by defining as simple and orthogonal a feature set as possible. In particular, both the product and the process of KobrA are based on the recursive application of a minimal set of core principles. Another major emphasis of KobrA is on quality. The very power of components and product lines to promote reuse makes it imperative that the reusable assets are of the highest possible quality. Clearly, an organization that systematically develops and reuses poor-quality artifacts will not fare well in the long run. Well-defined consistency rules, and systematic techniques for verifying them, are therefore integrated into all parts of the method.

The evolution of software development methods is characterized by periods in which there is a rapid proliferation of concepts followed by periods of unification and consolidation. The story of the UML is perhaps the clearest example of this pattern. We hope the ideas in KobrA will represent a step towards the consolidation of component-based and product line development concepts, and help to expose and refine some of the key principles involved. Product line engineering is characterized by the idea of analyzing and explicitly capturing the commonalities and variabilities among different members of a product family. Component-based development is characterized at the analysis and design levels by ìlocalizedî development artifacts (e.g. UML diagrams) focussed on the description of individual logical abstractions (i.e. components). These two core ideas form the backbone of the book.

The KobrA project

The method described in this book was developed as part of a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) known as the Komponentenbasierte Anwendungsentwicklung1 or KobrA project. Four organisations collaborated in the project:

• Fraunhofer-Institut f¸r Experimentelles Software Engineering (IESE), Kaiserslautern
• GMD-Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik (GMD-FIRST), Berlin
• PSIPENTA Software Systems GmbH, Berlin
• Softlab GmbH, M¸nchen (project leader)

with Fraunhofer IESE being primary responsible for the KobrA method. GMD-FIRST and Softlab developed a complementary workbench to support the use of the KobrA method in conjunction with commercial CASE tools, while PSIPENTA provided the test-bed for the approach in the domain of enterprise resource planning.

Target audience

This book is intended primarily for software engineers who are looking for a simple but prescriptive method for developing software, especially those involved in the development of a family of applications who seek leverage from existing software assets. Because of the modular nature of the method, the main technological ingredients can be applied independently of one another. Developers seeking support with component-based developments can apply the component-oriented ideas independently of product lines. Similarly, developers seeking help with model-driven architectures can apply the specification and realization ideas without worrying about components.

The book will also be of interest to academics and students who wish to gain a greater insight into the key principles of component-based development and/or product line engineering and how they relate to one another.

Readers should ideally have a familiarity with the general concepts of software engineering, the fundamentals of object-oriented software development, and the main features of the UML.

Document structure

The book is organized in five parts. Part 1 provides an introduction to the KobrA method and its background, and gives an overview of its key features. Part 2 focuses on the activities involved in modeling a system of logical components using the UML, without concern for product line issues. Part 3 describes how executable incarnations of these logical components can be attained, either by direct implementation or by the reuse of existing components such as Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, and discusses how this fits into an incremental development approach. Part 4 focuses on product line engineering, and shows how support for product lines can be added. Finally, Part 5 focuses on the critical supporting activities, namely maintenance, quality assurance, quality modeling, and the introduction of KobrA into real-life software development settings.

Two appendices follow the main body of the book. Appendix A describes the KobrA metamodel, and includes a complete listing of the consistency rules that govern the structure and relationships of components. Appendix B provides a detailed specification of the KobrA process, and includes a complete listing of the activities that make up the process and the product flow dependencies between them.

The library case study

A single, running case study is used in all but Part 1 of the book to illustrate the application of the KobrA method. The domain of library systems is used for the case study since its basic concepts are familiar to nearly everybody. Systems in this domain help librarians and information professionals perform the tasks involved in running a library. This includes assistance in customer interaction, stock management, and accounting.

The basic library system supports the management of registered users and available items and tracks all performed loans, returns, and reservations. This basic library is selected as the particular member of the library system family used to illustrate the development of single systems in Parts 2 and 3 of the book.

The illustration of the product line concepts in KobrA requires many more details about the library system domain to be useful. For this purpose, three library systems were analyzed and their common and distinct features modeled in a generic framework. The extension of the case study to cover product lines is explained in Part 4.

The complete case study, including both the basic library system and the library system product line is described in BMG01, which is available on the bookís website.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the support and contributions of numerous individduals to the ideas described in this book. First, we would like to thank our colleagues on the KobrA project and on the KobrA board: Marion Dikel, Robert Hagemann, Gernot Krause, Jˆrg Lucas, Jens Reinhold and Torsten Sander of PSIPENTA Software Systems GmbH, Martin Dehn, G¸nther Merbeth, Friedrich Rˆssler and Uwe Zeithammer of Softlab GmbH, Matthias Anlauf, Marko Fabiunke, Joanna Filipek, Boris Groth, Stefan J‰hnichen and Ronald Melster of GMD-FIRST, and G¸nther Ruhe of Fraunhofer IESE. Second, we would also like to thank our current and former colleagues at IESE: especially Stan Jarzabek, Dieter Rombach, Peter Rˆsch and Tanya Widen. Third, we would like to extend our thanks to our reviewers for their valuable feedback on drafts of the book, especially Morgan Bjorkander, Mathias Clauss, Mike Fischer, Hans-Gerhard Grob, Bernhard Humm, Heinrich Hussman, Thomas K¸hne, Cris Kobryn, Antje von Knethen, and Frank Maurer. Finally, special thanks are due to Brigitte Gˆpfert for her insights and expertise in the library information domain of the case study, Maud Schlich for her contribution to the testing chapter, Jhair Tocancipa for his help with the EJB and CORBA examples, and to our editor, Alison Birtwell, of Addison-Wesley for her encouragement and support. And last but not least we are grateful to the Fraunhofer IESE and the BMBF for supporting this work.

Website

Visit the bookís websites for more information on the topic:http://www.iese.fhg.de/KobrA/book
http://www.kobra-project.org

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Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0201737914
• ISBN 13: 9780201737912
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464