Analysis and Improvement of a Software Production Process based on the Combination of Model Driven Development and Software Product Lines

Software reuse is a key factor in reducing costs and improving the quality of software product properties such as security, reliability, or performance. Taking this factor in account, the Software Product Line approach appears for software development. This approach promises to decrease the time spent in developing software systems and to signi cantly reduce the costs for development and maintenance of software systems, among other things. In addition, Model Driven Development is an approach for software development that proposes the use of models at various levels of abstraction and model transformations as main artifacts. The use of models as the main artifacts in software development o ers many advantages for developers. For instance, model transformations allow the conversion of a source model into another target model. The increase in the level of abstraction allows the developers to focus on the problem to solve, subtracting importance to the implementation details.

Both paradigms search to optimize the production time and quality of the generated software, and can result in important advantages in the software production process. However, the combination of Model Driven Development and Software Product Lines to develop software products requires the identication of the challenges and needs of the involved stakeholders. The research presented in this dissertation, supported by several empirical studies carried out in industrial environments, aims to increase the knowledge in the field and to do a set of proposals to improve the software development process based on the combination of Model Driven Development and Software Product Lines. To achieve this objective, four dimensions have been studied: requirements processing, usability, comprehension (con guring software products), and error management. The dimensions have been addressed through empirical studies, presented in research papers. These papers conform the core of this dissertation.

As result of the work carried out for this dissertation, a set of proposals to improve the software development process based on the combination of Model Driven Development and Software Product Lines have been generated. Furthermore, seven research papers have been published. Five of these works have been presented at relevant conferences in the Software Engineering eld: CAiSE Forum'15, CAiSE'16, ESEM'16, ISD'17 and ESEM'17. These research results have been applied in the software development process of the induction hobs from the electrical appliances division of BSH (under the brands Bosch, Siemens, Gaggenau, Ne , and Balay), and are also being used in the current implementation of the PLC that controls the trains manufactured by the Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles company.