Assessing model-driven software product lines for lean and agile development: An experience report

Abstract

Combining best practices of software product line engineering and lean and agile software development remains a challenge to many organizations. We discuss this issue from the point of view of model-driven development which offers additional benefits by means of smart automation that cannot be gained by hand-crafted and code-centric approaches. While tools and modeling languages are orthogonal issues to the development process they should be easy to use and provide flexibility to support responsiveness to changes. We report experiences in assessing two industrial-size product line modeling approaches for flexibility. The first one is a structural UML model for a digital printer product line and the second a behavioral test model library for graphical user interface testing of smartphone applications. Both cases demonstrate the flexibility gained by the use of model-driven technologies, but aspect-oriented modeling features could further improve both approaches.