Software Product Line:Survey of Tools

Abstract: A software product line is a set of software-intensive systems that share a common, managed set of features satisfying the specificneeds of a particular market segment or mission. The main attractive part of SPL is developing a set of common assets which includes requirements, design, test plans, test cases, reusable software components and other artifacts. Tools for the development of softwareproduct line are very few in number. The purpose of these tools is to support the creation, maintenance and using different versions ofproduct line artifacts. This requires a development environment that supports the management of assets and product development,processes and sharing of assets among different products. The objective of this master thesis is to investigate the available tools which support Software Product Line process and itsdevelopment phases. The work is carried out in two steps, in the first step available Software Product Line tools are explored and a list of tools is prepared, managed and a brief introduction of each tool is presented. The tools are classified into different categoriesaccording to their usage, relation between the tools is established for better organization and understanding. In the second step, two tools Pure::variant and MetaEdit+ are selected and the quality factors such as Usability, Performance, Reliability, MemoryConsumption and Capacity are evaluated.