Towards a Dynamic Software Product Line: Analysis of the Background and State of the Art

Abstract

Dynamic software adaptability is one of the central features leveraged by autonomic computing. However, developing software that changes its behavior at run time in response to dynamically varying user needs and resource constraints is a challenging task. With the emergence of mobile and service oriented computing, such variation is becoming increasingly common, and the need for adaptivity is increasing accordingly. Software product line engineering has proved itself as an efficient way to deal with varying user needs and resource constraints. In this paper, we present a study of different approaches for design and runtime adaptation that can be used in the context of Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs). We propose a classification and a comparison of existing work. Afterwards, we refine our proposal by concretizing the research goals that fulfill the gaps current approaches present.