A prototype of a crowd-sourcing platform for classification and integration of analysis tools in product line engineering

Abstract

Adopting Product Line Engineering (PLE) approaches in the context of software-intensive systems reduces overall development and maintenance costs, reduces time to market and leads to an overall improvement in product quality. The Software and System Product Line (SPL) community has provided a large number of different analysis approaches and tools, which were developed in different contexts, answer different questions, and can contribute to the fulfillment of different analysis goals. The pursuit of these goals requires holistic approaches, i. e. integrated toolchains and classification of analyses, which are documented as a centralized collection of wisdom. Previously, we proposed a classification system for describing existing analyses. Furthermore, this method supports the search for possible combinations, i. e. toolchains which address the complex industrial needs in the context of adopting PLE approaches. In this paper, we present a prototype of a crowd-sourcing platform to collect and share the required information regarding existing analyses and toolchains. While overviews of PLE-aware analyses exist, we propose an interactive visualisation to identify and document the required input data and resulting information for each analysis method. With this platform, we hope to promote the usage of analysis approaches and encourage collaboration between researchers.