Specification and Utilization of Core Assets: Feature-Oriented vs. UML-Based Methods

Core assets are reusable artifacts built to be used in different software products in the same family. As such, core assets need to capture both commonality that exists and variability that is allowed in the product family (line). These assets are later utilized for guiding the creation of particular valid products in the family. Feature-oriented and UML-based methods have been proposed for modeling core assets. In this work, we suggest a framework for analyzing and evaluating core assets modeling methods. We use this framework for comparing two specific methods: feature-oriented CBFM and UML-based ADOM. We found similar performance in modifying core assets in the two methods and some interesting differences in core assets utilization.