Fragment-oriented programming: a framework to design and implement software product line domain components

Abstract

Software product lines facilitate the industrialization of software development. The main goal is to create a set of reusable software components for the rapid production of a software systems family. Many authors have proposed different approaches to design and implement the components of a product line. However, the construction and integration of these components continue to be a complex and time-consuming process. This paper introduces Fragment-oriented programming (FragOP), a framework to design and implement software product line domain components, and derive software products. FragOP is based on: (i) domain components, (ii) fragmentations points and (iii)fragments. FragOP was implemented in the VariaMos tool and using it we created a clothing stores software product line. We derivedfive different products, integrating automatically thousands of lines of code. On average, only three lines of code were manually modified;which provided preliminary evidence that using FragOP reduces manual intervention when integrating domain components.

Keywords

• software product lines
• fragment-oriented programming
• component development
• component composition