Generation, composition, and verification of families of human-intensive systems

Abstract

Software products are rarely developed without providing different sets of features to better meet varying user needs, whether through tiered products as part of a product line or different subscription levels for software as a service (SaaS). Software product line approaches for generating and maintaining a family of different variants of software products address such needs for variation quite well. Real-world human-intensive systems (HISs) display similar needs for families of variants. A key contribution of this paper is to show how many of these needs can be rigorously and systematically addressed by adapting established techniques from system and software product line engineering (SPLE). In this paper, we present an approach for creating such families by explicitly modeling variation in HISs. We focus on two kinds of variation we have previously described in other work---functional detail variation and service variation. We describe a prototype system that is able to meet the need for these kinds of variation within an existing modeling framework and present a case study of the application of our prototype system to generate a family in an HIS from the domain of elections. Our approach also demonstrates how to perform model-checking of this family to discover whether any variants in the family may violate specified system requirements.