FRAUNHOFER INSTITUTE FOR EXPERIMENTAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IESE VARIATION MANAGEMENT: USER EXPERIENCE FOR EFFICIENCY IN PROVIDING SOLUTIONS

Transcription

1 FRAUNHOFER INSTITUTE FOR EXPERIMENTAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IESE VARIATION MANAGEMENT: USER EXPERIENCE FOR EFFICIENCY IN PROVIDING BUSINESS CUSTOMIZED APPLICATIONS SOLUTIONS

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3 Do you need to develop variation-rich software systems efficiently? The demand for customized and sustainable system and software solutions is growing tremendously in almost all market segments. Drivers behind this trend are the globalization of companies, the ever-increasing pace of technological evolution, and the increasing customer market power. If products are developed and maintained in separate and independent projects, the effort for managing, maintaining, and evolving the resulting product variants and versions typically becomes a choking factor for innovation over time. This bears the risk of entering the market too late, with insufficient quality, or at too high cost. More systematic and strategic approaches to manage the necessary product variants are required and available. Companies looking for such approaches are faced with product lines, product families, component-based reuse, eco-systems, configurable and runtime-adaptable products, and with a plethora of respective technologies, to name but a few. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet among them. Despite major improvements in the last decade regarding variant or variation management, the efficient and effective selection, customization, adoption, and migration of suitable variation management approaches is still challenging and error-prone for companies, maybe more so than ever before. This holds for embedded systems as well as for information systems. Unleash the Potential in your Product Variants Reap the benefits for your business by optimizing your product portfolio, providing adequate reuse and adaptation support, and managing the product variants and versions efficiently throughout their lifetime in collaboration with Fraunhofer IESE. Empower your Business with Variation Management We offer competencies and services to: In order to exploit the full potential of systematic and strategic variation management, we have supported our customers for more than ten years with independent, industry-proven, and state-of-the-art variation management competencies and services. We help them to provide and sustain their customer-specific solutions at high speed, low cost, and high quality, and thus give them a pivotal success factor for their business. Our current variation management approaches build upon our successful Product Software Line Engineering methodology (PuL- SE ). They help our customers to address challenges such as light-weight adoption or enrichment of a variation management approach, definition of a competitive and innovative product portfolio, structuring of solutions by means of sound architectures, usage of the most efficient and simple practices preferably supported by effective automation, as well as the capability for evolution without major investments. Understand variations in already existing products and characterize the improvement potential, plan the migration towards an improved product portfolio, structure variation-rich solutions by means of adequate product and family architectures, realize the required variation support in the various artifacts, from requirements to code, integrate variation management into the software develop ment process, and support the evolution of the product portfolio, from the planning level down to the realization level. On the following pages, you will learn how to benefit from efficient and effective variation management. Sincerely, Martin Becker Karina Villela 3

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5 DO YOU WANT TO BENEFIT FROM THE REUSE POTENTIAL OF YOUR EXISTING PRODUCTS? Business Success through Strategy In many cases, the required product portfolio cannot be determined upfront. Instead, the need for new customizations and product variants often emerges later, when a software product is already on the market. In consequence, the existing product code is typically adjusted to create a new variant. With time, the dynamically changing market requirements cause the initially minor product variations to grow into large and complex inter-product dependencies. At this point, it is beneficial to optimize the current variation management approach in order to fully exploit the reuse potential existing in the product portfolio. Detailed Insight In order to enable a fact-based assessment of our customers current reuse potential, we perform tool-based analyses of artifacts. In particular, we analyze the source code in order to reliably detect those code parts that can be turned into generic, reusable software assets with little effort. Additionally, several variation-related measurements provide detailed information on the variant-specific code in order to help the developers optimize their variation mechanisms. Business Alignment While the artifact analyses deliver insights into the technical possibilities of software reuse, the high-level business perspective is equally important. Using pattern-based document analysis, we support the definition of a product portfolio. Our technique allows identifying potential product features based on existing systems documentation, thereby reducing the workload of domain experts. Finally, the planned changes need to be optimally introduced into the existing product portfolio. For that step, we perform an assessment of variation management practices to identify the merits and drawbacks of currently used practices. We analyze all variation-relevant assets such as build configurations, preprocessor statements, and version control repositories, and recommend the necessary improvements. weight Approach Thanks to the emphasis on utilizing existing assets and on effective tool support, our customers can optimize their variation management mechanisms and/or adopt more suitable approaches in a light-weight way. 5

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7 ARE YOU PLANNING TO ENRICH YOUR PRODUCT PORTFOLIO? Business Success Scoping through Companies are faced with several questions when planning a portfolio of similar software products, such as: What products and features should we invest in? How to prepare for a changing domain environment? How to migrate from the existing products to the optimal product portfolio? With our scoping workshop, we help our customers to decide what product variants they should bring to the market or offer to specific companies. We also help them to reason about the features those product variants should include, taking into consideration the impact on customer satisfaction, technical risks, and engineering costs. Innovation Market Orientation Once the product variants and features have been defined, it is crucial to decide which parts of the product variants should be implemented in a common infrastructure. To this end, we perform a domain assessment, in which features are grouped into areas of functionality and assessed in terms of market potential, maturity, and availability of existing artifacts, among other criteria. Our tool-based analyses greatly support this activity, which provides the basis for planning the migration of the product portfolio. Taking the company s existing artifacts, knowhow, budget, and goals into account, we support our customers in choosing the design strategy for engineering the common infrastructure and variation mechanisms, and in concrete planning the migration towards a more competitive product portfolio. ROI While the scoping workshop focuses on current, planned, and potential product variants and features, our approach for an innovation and evolution plan addresses the prediction of and planning for the evolution of those product variants and features, and contributes to the discovery of further innovation opportunities. It assures that all relevant actors that play a role in the business environment are taken into consideration. The result is the enrichment of the product portfolio migration plan with information on how to deal with those likely innovation and evolution needs. The result to our customers is not only the definition of a competitive product portfolio, but they also get a sound basis for their (re)engineering work. 7

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9 ARE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT DEVELOPMENT / MIGRATION RISKS? Business Success through Specialized Methods CUSTOmization Separation ofconcerns When it comes to the actual realization of variation-rich software systems, a lot of effort is needed. This is true for newly created systems as well as for adapted ones. Proper selection of methods and tools is necessary in order to preserve investment and reduce the risk of failing. Our requirements engineering for variation-rich software systems approach consolidates and enriches Fraunhofer IESE s industry-proven and state-of-the-art competencies on requirements engineering to allow the elicitation and modeling of commonalities and variabilities at an early stage. We use a business-driven and user-centric approach, which is ideally suited for the complex software systems used in today s industry. A robust set of requirements is no guarantee that the system will actually satisfy them. Our architecture engineering for variation-rich software systems approach supports software engineers in systematically decomposing the business-driven user goals into implementation concepts. In our approach, the main architectural drivers and usage scenarios are identified in order to allow iteratively constructing a holistic architecture. This makes it possible to plan either for constructing systems with high variation or for migrating towards effective support for variation in existing systems. While the concrete realization of variations can be done in many different ways, sustainable evolution can only be achieved when the appropriate variation mechanisms are selected. Our approach for variation-rich software systems implementation helps our customers to find the right mechanisms for implementing variation and collecting metrics to control the software evolution. Consistency In addition, traceability from end-user features to concrete realization elements avoids wrong feature combinations and therefore facilitates the process of building new product variants. We help our customers in selecting and adopting the variation management tool that best suits their needs, budget, and existing tool chain. Selecting the right tool can save much effort and meets our customers desire for efficient practices supported by effective automation. 9

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11 DO YOU NEED TO EVOLVE YOUR PRODUCTS OVER A LONGER PERIOD OF TIME? Sustainability through Business Success Every software development organization finds out that the work on successful software products does not end after initial development. Realworld software systems must continually evolve in order to remain useful for end-users. Likewise, real-world product lines or common infrastructures must continually evolve in order to provide the expected reuse benefits. We help our customers in keeping their variationrich solutions as sustainable as required throughout their lifetime. Incremental Development Handling Complexity reduction is a key aspect for the sustainability of evolving real-world products. We help our customers in detecting and refactoring unnecessary variation-related complexities, which would otherwise introduce penalties in their artifacts efficiency, reusability, or customizability. By removing unnecessary complexities (through variation complexity measurement and refactoring) and introducing repeatable quality assurance practices, the quality of existing artifacts improves significantly, whereas the effort for evolving variation-rich solutions is reduced. Another relevant activity for assuring quality and speeding up the engineering process, especially in an agile development context, is continuous integration. It facilitates rapid, cheap, and incremental development without the permanent risk of accidentally introducing new bugs. We provide quality assurance services that allow our customers to continuously integrate their code - from build automation and self-testing to automated deployment. Response to Changes Furthermore, configuration management, or variation management across time, is a vital engineering process for coping with changes in the various software artifacts. We provide our customers with configuration management support especially tailored to their individual needs that effectively coordinates the development lifecycle of the common infrastructure and the individual product variants. Our customers can thereby store and evolve their artifacts in a traceable and more consistent way. Our approaches for complexity reduction, continuous integration, and configuration management provide feasible everyday practices and are supported by customizable tools, enabling our customers to sustainably evolve their variation-rich solutions. 11

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13 EMBEDDED SYSTEMS AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS: SPECIALIZING VARIATION MANAGEMENT TO DOMAINS Domain specific Solutions IESE s core competencies and services in variation management are widely applicable to any domain in software systems development. In order to optimally address our customers challenges, we specialize our competencies and services for Embedded Systems and Information Systems, which means understanding the typical challenges, solution concepts, technologies, and standards of these two types of systems. Automotive Medical Systems Automation In Embedded Systems, we work in domains such as automotive and transportation, medical systems, and automation and plant engineering. Efficient and effective variation management is one of the most pivotal engineering capabilities there. The need for variation results from highly customized products, tight resource constraints, differing hardware platforms, varying dependability requirements, and different lifecycles of product parts. Especially variation in time is becoming more and more relevant as modern embedded systems must remain maintainable and evolvable throughout their lifetime. Organizations developing embedded systems usually have to deal with standard compliance (e.g., ISO 26262, AUTOSAR), or with the integration of functionalities developed by different sub-contractors. With our specialized analysis models, solution concepts, and expertise, we support our customers in tackling their particular variation management challenges. Health Care Logistics Finance In Information Systems, we work in areas such as health care, finance and insurance, airlines and logistics, egovernment, and agriculture. Systems range from company-internal information systems to systems providing online services. Today, these must be accessible at the user s convenience, from the office as well as from mobile devices. The key challenges for large-scale, long-living information systems are how to handle the inherent complexity, how to provide the required flexibility, and how to support interoperability and positive user experience. Our variation management services provide the basis for addressing these challenges by facilitating the efficient and effective management of variants and customer-specific configurations. In information systems, there are widely known paradigms like service-oriented architecture (SOA), business rule management (BRM), or cloud computing, which are supported by multiple technologies. We help our customers to understand the essence of these paradigms from a business and technology perspective, and to integrate variation management techniques into them. 13

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15 VARIATION MANAGEMENT: FACTS, FIGURES AND EXPERIENCES ROI Our product line approach (PuLSE ) brings a positive return on investment already after the release of two to three products. Productivity With the help of PuLSE, one of our customers was able to release five times more products, which were four times more complex, and had three times more features, without increasing the effort. Reuse and Maintainability By using PuLSE, an IESE customer could increase the reuse rate from 17% to 50% and reduce architectural divergences from 17% to 1%, thereby improving maintainability. In general, the adoption of our variation management approaches has allowed our customer to increase their reuse rate up to 88% and reduce module dependencies up to 56%. The adoption of our variation management approaches by customers has allowed them to release new product variants up to twenty times faster. New Markets and Innovation Our scoping workshop and further product portfolio planning services have made it possible for several of IESE s customers to quickly enter a new market. Resource consumption is normally a concern for embedded systems. In restructuring families of products by means of reference architectures, we achieved the intended reuse and productivity goals with no significant increase in resource consumption (below 3%). Our architecture engineering approach for variation-rich software systems integrates flexibility concepts that facilitate customization. In a use case, our innovation and evolution plan approach improved the initial product portfolio plan by adding 21 new features and changing the description of 11 features. These improvements were already implemented in the very next version of the product variants. In a customer s product line, 25% of the existing code contained unused duplicated code, which could be removed by IESE s complexity reduction approach. Using our tool-based analyses, we analyzed within 15 minutes a product portfolio consisting of four products, each having 1.5 million lines of source code. In the end, we confirmed that over 50% of the code could be transformed into reusable assets, and we listed all the source code components that could be made reusable. For each source code part of 14 product variants, we correctly identified all the locations where the code was used in the other product variants. Our customer then knows all the locations to be corrected if a bug is found in a specific product. 15

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17 VARIATION MANAGEMENT SERVICES Different customers have different goals and characteristics and no two projects for engineering variation-rich systems are alike. Out of the following key services, we arrange the optimal approach for the customer and tailor it to best fit the challenges and opportunities at hand. Requirements Engineering for Variation-Rich Software Systems We use a business-driven and user-centric approach to support the elicitation and modeling of commonalities and variabilities at an early stage. Tool-based Analyses of Artifacts We analyze the source code in order to reliably detect those code parts that can be turned into generic, reusable software assets with little effort. Pattern-based Document Analysis We support identification of potential product features based on existing documentation, thereby reducing the workload of domain experts involved in the product feature definition. Assessment of Variation Management Practices We identify the merits and drawbacks of currently used variation management practices. We analyze all variation-relevant assets such as build configurations and preprocessor statements, and recommend the necessary improvements. Scoping Workshop We help our customers to decide what product variants and their respective features they should bring to the market or offer to specific companies, taking into consideration customer satisfaction, technical risks, and engineering costs. Architecture Engineering for Variation-Rich Software Systems We support software engineers in identifying the main architectural drivers and usage scenarios in order to allow either constructing systems with high variation or migrating towards an effective support for variation in existing systems. Variation-Rich Software Systems Implementation We help our customers to find the right mechanisms for implementing variation and collecting metrics to control the software evolution. Tool Selection and Support for Tool Adoption We help our customer in selecting and adopting the variation management tool that best suits their needs, budget, and existing tool chain. Complexity Reduction We help our customers in detecting and refactoring unnecessary variation-related complexities, which would otherwise introduce penalties in their artifacts efficiency, reusability, or customizability. Domain Assessment We help customers in deciding which parts of the product variants should be implemented in a common infrastructure, taking into account market potential, maturity, and availability of existing artifacts, among other criteria. Innovation and Evolution Plan We support the prediction of and planning for the evolution of product variants and features, and the discovery of further innovation opportunities. Continuous Integration We provide quality assurance services that allow our customers to continuously integrate their code - from build automation and self-testing to automated deployment. Configuration Management We provide our customers with configuration management support especially tailored to their individual needs that effectively coordinates the development lifecycle of the common infrastructure and the individual product variants. 17

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19 THE FRAUNHOFER INSTITUTE FOR EXPERIMENTAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IESE Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE Fraunhofer-Platz Kaiserslautern Germany Leadership Software is a part of our lives. Embedded into everyday equipment, into living and working environments or modern means of transportation, countless processors and controllers make our lives simpler, safer, and more pleasant. We help organizations to develop software systems that are reliable in every aspect, and provide empirical proof of the necessary processes, methods, and techniques, emphasizing engineering-style principles such as measurability and transparency. Fraunhofer IESE is one of the worldwide leading research institutes in the area of software and systems development. A major portion of the products offered by our collaboration partners is defined by software. These products range from automotive and transportation systems via automation and plant engineering, information systems, health care and medical systems to software systems for the public sector. Our solutions allow flexible scaling. This makes us a competent technology partner for organizations of any size from small companies to major corporations. Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Dieter Rombach Executive Director Under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Dieter Rombach and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Liggesmeyer, the past decade has seen us making major contributions to strengthening the emerging IT location Kaiserslautern. In the Fraunhofer Information and Communication Technology Group, we are cooperating with other Fraunhofer institutes on developing trend-setting key technologies for the future. Fraunhofer IESE is one of 60 institutes of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. Together we have a major impact on shaping applied research in Europe and contribute to Germany s competitivenessin international markets. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Liggesmeyer Scientific Director 19

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21 EMBEDDED SYSTEMS DEVELOPEMENT (ESD) Department Head Dr. Martin Becker Hidden in transportation systems, medical devices, consumer goods, and almost all other technical products, embedded systems are performing essential tasks that make our daily lives safer and more comfortable. Every year, more than three billion embedded components and devices are manufactured, incorporating 98% percent of all microprocessors built. Embedded systems are omnipresent, and our modern economy and society would be unable to survive without them. In order to be able to develop such highly reliable and safe systems in a cost-efficient manner, development must focus on system quality right from the outset. This means that efficient support is needed for the developers to allow them to keep track of everything, despite rapidly increasing system complexity, and to make the right decisions based upon facts. The ESD department supports its customers during the entire development cycle from requirements to implementation. Model-based Development If you want to model not only software, but entire systems including the relevant non-functional properties, off-the-shelf technologies often do not suffice. When it comes to selecting, adapting, and combining suitable languages and tools, the experts of Fraunhofer IESE will provide comprehensive support for model-based development. Architecture-Centric Engineering The system architecture influences quality and development costs across system generations. Using our Fraunhofer ACES approach, systematic processes in combination with automated, tool-supported architecture analyses and simulations make it possible to assess existing architectures and to identify and assess possible architecture variants early on. Architecture faults can thus be avoided proactively already during development. FRAUNHOFER-INSTITUT FÜR EXPERIMENTELLES SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IESE ARCHITECTURE-CENTRIC USER EXPERIENCE FOR SOFTWARE AND SYSTEMS BUSINESS ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS Variation Management Embedded systems are often not single products, but rather product families. They must be extensible and changeable throughout their lifetime. The strategic planning of product variants and modifications enables reuse rates of over 90%. Thus, system quality increases while costs and development times decrease. The ESD department supports its customers with efficient methods for variation management from the initial potentials analysis to the introduction of customized solutions in the organization. VARIABILITY MANAGEMENT: USER EXPERIENCE FOR EFFICIENCY IN PROVIDING BUSINESS INDIVIDUAL APPLICATIONS SOLUTIONS 21

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23 INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT (ISD) Department Head Dr. Marcus Trapp The division Information Systems Development develops innovative methods and solutions for the development of complex information systems and interactive systems. In order to offer an immediate added value, we apply our methods directly during our customers product development and/or transfer our methods and solutions to our customers. These include organizations that use software solutions for their business processes, e.g., from the banking and insurance sector or from the domain of medical IT systems, organizations from such areas as public administration and defense, as well as software developing companies (both large corporations and SMEs). We address challenges arising during development early and continuously with the help of constructive, innovative development approaches and methods, from requirements elicitation via architecture to design. Our strength lies in examining the non-functional (quality) requirements, which are hard to capture and often affect the entire system. Clearly defined software development artifacts with clearly defined levels of abstraction allow focusing on what is really important and interlink with both traditional and agile process models.n. Requirements Engineering We support you with our renowned requirements approach Satisfy, which is tailored to your needs and goals and ensures traceability, integrated usability, and minimal documentation of the necessary requirements decisions. SATISFY! USER EXPERIENCE FOR PROJEKTERFOLG VON BUSINESS ANFANG APPLICATIONS AN User Experience for Business Applications With our proven methods we support you in developing systems that not only support their users, but also allow having a positive User Experience. This has been proven to contribute to the achievement of your business goals. USER EXPERIENCE USER EXPERIENCE FOR FÜR GESCHÄFTSANWENDUNGEN BUSINESS APPLICATIONS Architecture-Centric Engineering With our successful Fraunhofer ACES approach, we support you in defining and evaluating architectures for complex information systems. The iterative, scenario-based process allows you to master the complexity of architecture definition and migration and to make reliable predictions regarding critical features of the system early on. ARCHITECTURE-CENTRIC USER EXPERIENCE FOR SOFTWARE AND SYSTEMS BUSINESS ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS Variation Management We support you in establishing, developing, and managing software product lines as well as in analyzing and improving your already existing configuration infrastructure for variation-rich information systems. Our services build upon our successful product line engineering approach PuLSE and extends it to support several other variation management approaches. VARIABILITY MANAGEMENT: USER EXPERIENCE FOR EFFICIENCY IN PROVIDING BUSINESS INDIVIDUAL APPLICATIONS SOLUTIONS Business goes Mobile With our product GoMobile we help you to exactly identify those areas where a mobile app makes sense as support for your business processes. We can also develop a prototype that can be executed on various mobile devices to help you make your decisions. USER EXPERIENCE FOR BUSINESS APPLICATIONS GO MOBILE WE MOBILIZE YOUR BUSINESS 23

24 Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Enginering IESE Fraunhofer-Platz Kaiserslautern Germany Dr. Karina Villela Phone karina.villela@iese.fraunhofer.de Dr. Martin Becker Phone martin.becker@iese.fraunhofer.de 24