Platform Design for Software Product Lines of Data-intensive Systems

Software product line engineering promises rapid, feature oriented development of similar products in a particular domain by reusing core artifacts. Commonalities and variabilities of individual products are obtained by domain analysis and described in feature models. According to the feature model, reusable core assets or artifacts need to be designed and implemented to be assembled in particular products. In this paper we present a platform supporting product line development of data-intensive systems, based on the concepts of component based and model-driven development. Data-intensive systems are often built in several layers (e.g. database, business logic, user interface), so we have applied the methodology of product line engineering to each layer to find artifacts, describe their characteristics and dependencies. Mappings are defined between features and artifacts in order to assemble different products from these reusable artifacts. Model-based strategies to tackle cross-cutting of variabilities-arising especially from data model variabilities-are presented.