Reconciling Automation and Flexibility in Product Derivation

Product derivation, i.e. reusing core assets to build products, did not receive sufficient attention from the product-line community, yielding a frustrating situation. On the one hand, automated product derivation approaches are inflexible; they do not allow products meeting unforeseen, customer-specific, requirements. On the other hand, approaches that consider this issue do not provide adequate methodological guidelines nor automated support. This paper proposes an integrated product derivation approach reconciling the two views to offer both flexibility and automation. First, we perform a pre-configuration of the product by selecting desired features in a generic feature model and automatically composing their related product-line core assets. Then, we adapt the pre-configured product to its customer-specific requirements via derivation primitives combined by product engineers and controlled by constraints that flexibly set product line boundaries. Our process is supported by the Kermeta metamodeling environment and illustrated through an example.