Parametric DeltaJ 1.5: Propagating Feature Attributes into Implementation Artifacts

Systematic reuse of software artifacts can be achieved with software product lines, which represent a family of similar software systems. A variability model, e.g., feature model, describes their commonalities and variabilities and serves as a basis for a product configuration, i.e., the selection of features according to constraints defined in the model. These variability models can contain additional information, such as attributes, which enrich features with typed values for various purposes (e.g., optimization, simplified readability). Typically, these attributes are not directly reusable in code artifacts as the variability model is only used to assemble or change code artifacts according to a product configuration. Furthermore, there are many languages for implementing software product lines such as DeltaJ which do not support the direct propagation of feature attributes to the associated code artifacts. In this paper, we present parametric DeltaJ, an adaptation of the programming language DeltaJ for delta-oriented software product lines in Java. parametric DeltaJ allows the propagation of typed attributes from an attributed feature model to Java code artifacts. We perform a case study to show that introducing parameters reduces the number of variables, delta modules and lines of code for delta-oriented software product lines.