A Systematic Process for Defining Meshing Tool Software Product Line Domain Model

Once an organization decides to develop a software product line (SPL), one of the first activities that needs to be done is to build a domain model. Here, commonalities and variabilities are identified, as well as the particular characteristics that products of the SPL will have. Although there exist some methods proposed for domain modeling, they are general and not specifically designed for scientific software, let alone for meshing tools. Meshing tools are highly complex software for generating and managing geometrical discretizations. Due to this complexity, they have generally been developed by end users with ad-hoc methodologies and not applying well established software engineering practices. Nevertheless, many meshing tools with varying degrees of variability have been developed over the years, making them a good application domain for SPL. This paper proposes a systematic process for building the domain model, specially suited for the case of a meshing tool SPL. We formally define the structure of the domain model, the process for building this model in a rigorous way, and we apply it to produce a meshing tool domain model. Both, the model and the process, are described and exemplified along the paper.