Addressing Fine-Grained Variability in User-Centered Software Product Lines: A Case Study on Dashboards

Abstract

Software product lines provide a theoretical framework to generate and customize products by studying the target domain and by capturing the commonalities among the potential products of the family. This domain knowledge is subsequently used to implement a series of configurable core assets that will be systematically reused to obtain products with different features to match particular user requirements. Some kind of interactive systems, like dashboards, require special attention as their features are very fine-grained. Having the capacity of configuring a dashboard product to match particular user requirements can improve the utility of these products by providing the support to users to reach useful insights, in addition to a decrease in the development time and an increase in maintainability. Several techniques for implementing features and variability points in the context of SPLs are available, and it is important to choose the right one to exploit the SPL paradigm benefits to the maximum. This work addresses the materialization of fine-grained variability in SPL through code templates and macros, framed in the particular domain of dashboards.