Supporting Runtime System Adaptation through Product Line Engineering and Plug-in Techniques

Product line engineering and plug-in techniques pursue different but complementary goals. Software product line engineering strives for modeling the variability of software systems on different levels of abstraction, whereas plug-in systems support software extensibility, customizability, and evolution. We present an approach demonstrating the benefits of integrating those two areas and discuss the integration of a plug-in platform for enterprise software with an existing product line engineering tool suite. The plug-in platform provides extensibility as well as runtime reconfiguration and adaptation mechanisms on the .NET platform. Automatic runtime adaptations are attained by using the knowledge documented in variability models. We discuss several usage scenarios developed in cooperation with our industry partner illustrating the need of our approach in the enterprise software domain. Finally, we validate the approach on a commercial ERP system of our industry partner.

1. Introduction

Runtime adaptation of software systems has received considerable attention in research areas such as software architecture, product line engineering, or self-adaptive systems. The need for runtime adaptation of systems is obvious for new development paradigms such as mobile and pervasive computing or service-oriented systems to deal with context changes. How-ever, even in more traditional environments practitioners are demanding capabilities to adapt a system to changing conditions during system operation. For instance, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is inherently complex and feature-rich. Runtime adaptation allows providing just the right set of features required to support particular business processes.