Domain Analysis of E-Commerce Systems Using Feature-Based Model Templates

The pervasiveness and criticality of software applications in modern times have resulted in the demand for highly customized, high quality products in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Model-Driven Software Product Lines (MDSPL) is an approach to software development which allows developers to automatically build such products based on configuration knowledge and reusable assets. A product line is a group of related products that can be built from a common set of assets. The approach relies on two activities: 1) Domain Engineering, where features in the product line are scoped and reusable assets are built, and 2) Application Engineering, where individual products are built from the reusable assets. The MDSPL approach is supported by feature models and feature-based model templates. Feature models are a modeling notation used to represent the variability in a system family and describe all valid configurations. Feature-based model templates describe models for all valid products in a product line and are parameterized with feature configurations.

In this work, we develop an example, inspired by a realistic application, of a product line of Business-to-Consumer systems, which is used to demonstrate the viability of the approach on a real world scenario. In addition, we analyze our experience with the approach in order to produce guidelines for users of the modeling approach and recommendations for future improvements of the approach and the tools. The key recommendations include proposals to 1) investigate the representation of ordering in feature models and activity diagram model templates, 2) extend the existing work on the semantics of class and activity diagram model templates, and 3) add mechanisms to address annotation consistency issues.