VULCAN: architecture-model-based software development workbench

Abstract

Recently, software developers are faced with a fierce market competition with: diverse market needs, ever increasing number of features, and shortening product life cycle. To survive in this fierce competition, software developers are searching for methods and tools to develop various products with reduced time-to-market and improved quality. In response to these needs, we present a new CASE called VULCAN. VULCAN is a software development workbench comprising various tools for supporting the entire phases of feature-oriented product line software development from feature modeling to asset and product development. Especially, it provides several tools for supporting architecture-model-based software development where: (1) product line architectures can be specified using various architecture patterns, (2) application-specific architectures can be derived from the product line architecture specifications, (3) application-specific control components can be generated from the application architecture specifications, and (4) different deployment architectures can be configured with various component communication mechanisms. Of various tools included in VULCAN, we focus on this tool set for supporting architecture-model-based software development in this paper and demonstration.