Agile product line engineering Toolkit

ApleT is a framework for performing agile product line engineering, particularly with .NET web applications and a behaviour-driven development approach in mind. ApleT follows the feature-oriented software development (FOSD) methodology.

ApleT is currently in very early stages of development. See django-productline for a much more mature FOSD framework for Django and Python.

Software product line engineering (SPLE) provides an efficient means to produce software that is delivered to multiple customers, in bespoke form, derived from a composable, reusable set of assets. Effective use of SPLE can reduce defects, costs, and time to market by a factor of 10 or more. SPLE is desirable in small- to medium-sized enterprises, where a common occurrence is the introduction of a one-off product that proves to be popular, and over time requires multiple customer-specific versions. However, in its more traditional form (the proactive approach, with a focus on the long-term up-front domain engineering phase), SPLE is not always viable for SMEs. Agile product line engineering (APLE), the combination of SPLE and agile software development, is a reactive approach to facilitating SPLE in SMEs that can cut down the long-term investment of the domain engineering phase.

Behaviour-driven development (BDD) is an agile software development methodology focused on specifying and testing software through business-focused examples. Through incorporating the concept of variability management, a core tenet of SPLE, into behaviour-driven development, ApleT provides an agile approach to product lines that provides automated, specification-based regression testing across the entire product line. This approach enables the safe evolution of product lines both in terms of requirements and in terms of architecture that avoids big design up front.

FOSD is a particular approach to SPLE that focuses strongly on the idea of features and their representation througout the entire software lifecycle.

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Background

• Motivations
• Software product line engineering
  • Overview
  • Variability management
  • Binding times
  • Artifact dependencies
  • SPLE Process
• Behaviour-driven development
  • Gherkin
  • Step definition code
  • Progress reports
• Feature-oriented software development
• Benefits of ApleT

Variability in BDD

• Linking feature model features to BDD features
• Categorising ways to make BDD variability-aware
  • Variability implementation dimensions
  • Quality Criteria
• Components of BDD and variability
  • Gherkin
  • Step definition code
  • Progress reports
• Variability-awareness techniques for BDD
  • Build system
  • Annotation by product
  • Annotation by feature
  • Feature module composition
  • Modeling scenario variability as crosscutting mechanisms
  • Aspectual feature modules
  • Summary

Using ApleT

• ApleT Overview
• The ApleT Process
• The ApleT Toolchain
  • Reference implementation of ApleT in .NET
  • Example Java toolchain for ApleT
• ApleT Roles
• Worked Example
  • The TodoMonkey product line
  • The process

Web Application Product Lines

• Multi-tenancy
  • Resources
• Architecture
• .NET web application product lines
  • Blog Posts
  • What needs composing in an ASP.NET MVC web application?
  • ASP.NET MVC Areas
  • ASP.NET MVC Portable Areas
  • FubuMVC bottles
  • OrchardCMS
• Other web application product line frameworks
  • Python/Django
  • Ruby on Rails
  • PHP/Symfony

Appendices

• References
• TODO
• Notes

Indices and tables

• Index
• Module Index
• Search Page