Abstract

About 30 years ago the pioneers of family-based software development invented very useful models. Today we would describe them as models that help software engineers to bridge the gap between variable requirements and the reference architecture of a product line platform. This is one of the key challenges in product line engineering. In this paper we revisit one of these models, namely the functional hierarchy. The goal is to derive a new model called a concern hierarchy that also takes today’s knowledge about crosscutting concerns and aspect-oriented programming into account. The resulting concern hierarchy model facilitates the design of aspect-oriented software product lines by supporting the derivation of class hierarchies, aspects, and their dependency relations more systematically without being overly complex.

Citations