Philippe Collet

University of Nice Sophia Antipolis | UNS · I3S Research Laboratory

Most modern object-oriented software systems are variability-rich, despite that they may not be developed as product lines. Their variability is implemented by several traditional techniques in combination, such as inheritance, overloading, or design patterns. As domain features or variation points with variants are not a by-product of these techni...

In many industrial settings, the common and varying features of related software-intensive systems, as their reusable units, are likely to be implemented by a combined set of traditional techniques. Features do not align perfectly well with the used language constructs, e.g., classes, thus hindering the management of implemented variability. Herein...

This article introduces a conceptual reference framework – the Models and Data (MODA) framework – to support a data-centric and model-driven approach for the integration of heterogeneous models and their respective data for the entire life-cycle of socio-technical systems. A pre-print version is available at https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02612087

Feature models are recognized as a de facto standard for variability modeling. Presented almost three decades ago, dozens of different variations and extensions to the original feature-modeling notation have been proposed, together with hundreds of variability management techniques building upon feature models. Unfortunately, despite several attemp...

When variability is implemented into a single variability-rich system with object-oriented techniques (e.g., inheritance, overloading, design patterns), the variation points and variants usually do not align with the domain features. It is then very hard and time consuming to manually identify these variation points to manage variability at the imp...

In many variability-intensive systems, variability is implemented in code units provided by a host language, such as classes or functions, which do not align well with the domain features. Annotating or creating an orthogonal decomposition of code in terms of features implies extra effort, as well as massive and cumbersome refactoring activities. I...

The massive evolution of IT development towards new Web architectures, from service-oriented to micro-services, clouds and containers, call for changes in the way software is developed, deployed and maintained.

Data-flow oriented embedded systems, such as automotive systems used to render HMI (e.g., instrument clusters, infotainments), are increasingly built from highly variable specifications while targeting different constrained hardware platforms configurable in a fine-grained way. These variabilities at two different levels lead to a huge number of po...

Sensor networks empower Internet of Things (IoT) applications by connecting them to physical world measurements. However, the necessary use of limited bandwidth networks and battery-powered devices makes their optimal configuration challenging. An over-usage of periodic sensors (i.e. too frequent measurements) may easily lead to network congestion...

Innovative services induced by blockchain technologies have social, economical, legal and technical impacts. For this reason, the project smart Internet of Things (IoT) for mobility has adopted a transdisciplinary scientific approach to investigate how blockchain technology would enhance confidence in IoT based services. More precisely, it focuses...

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) bridge the gap between the problem space, in which stakeholders work, and the solution space, i.e., the concrete artifacts defining the target system. They are usually small and intuitive languages whose concepts and expressiveness fit a particular domain. DSLs recently found their application in an increasingly bro...

Data-flow oriented embedded systems, such as automotive systems used to render HMI (e.g., instrument clusters, infotainments), are increasingly built from highly variable specifications while targeting different constrained hardware platforms configurable in a finegrained way. These variabilities at two different levels lead to a huge number of pos...

The SOA ecosystem has drastically evolved since its childhood in the early 2000s. From monolithic services, micro-services now cooperate together in ultra-large scale systems. In this context, there is a tremendous need to deploy frequently new services, or new version of existing services. Container-based technologies (e.g., Docker) emerged recent...

In many Software product lines (SPLs), if domain variability can be properly specified in terms of features in a feature model (FM), their implementation in core-code assets is hard to capture and maintain, as there are different techniques to implement the variability. Even with an organization in variation points and variants, most of these techn...

In a software product line (SPL) engineering approach, the addressed variability in core-code assets must be consistent with the specified domain variability, usually captured in a variability model, e.g., a feature model. Currently, the support for checking such consistency is limited, mostly when a single variability implementation technique is u...

Concern-Oriented Reuse (CORE) proposes a new way of structuring model-driven software development, where models of the system are modularized by domains of abstraction within units of reuse called concerns. Within a CORE concern, models are further decomposed and modularized by features. This paper extends CORE with a technique that enables develop...

Concern-Oriented Reuse (CORE) proposes a new way of structuring model-driven software development, where models of the system are modularized by domains of abstraction within units of reuse called concerns. Within a CORE concern, models are further decomposed and modularized by features. This paper extends CORE with a technique that enables develop...

Reuse, enabled by modularity and interfaces, is one of the most important concepts in software engineering. This is evidenced by an increasingly large number of reusable artifacts, ranging from small units such as classes to larger, more sophisticated units such as components, services, frameworks, software product lines, and concerns. This paper p...

Sensor networks are classically used in the Internet of Things to collect data, typically supporting Smart Cities or Smart Homes use cases. However, a deep knowledge of these networks is needed to properly develop applications over the deployed systems. This leads to a target mismatch: developers know how to exploit the collected data to develop la...

Among the different techniques that are used to design self-adaptive software systems, control theory allows one to design an adaptation policy whose properties, such as stability and accuracy, can be formally guaranteed under certain assumptions. However, in the case of software systems, the integration of these controllers to build complete feedb...

De nouveaux paradigmes, de nouveaux langages, de nouvelles approches de modélisation, de vérification, de tests et de nouveaux outils dans le domaine de la programmation et du logiciel devraient voir le jour dans les dix ans à venir, que ce soit pour faciliter la vie des concepteurs et mainteneurs de systèmes informatiques, pour modéliser et fiabil...

Goal models can capture the essence of legal and regulation statements and many of their relationships, enabling compliance analysis. However, current goal modeling approaches do not scale well when handling large regulations with many variable parts that depend on different aspects of regulated organizations. In this paper, we propose a tool-suppo...

Sensors networks are the backbone of large sensing infrastructures such as Smart Cities or Smart Buildings. Classical approaches suffer from several limitations hampering developers’ work (e.g., lack of sensor sharing, lack of dynamicity in data collection policies, need to dig inside big data sets, absence of reuse between implementation platforms...

Managing multiple and complex feature models is a tedious and error-prone activity in software product line engineering. Despite many advances in formal methods and analysis techniques, the supporting tools and APIs are not easily usable together, nor unified. In this paper, we report on the development and evolution of the Familiar Domain-Specific...

Model manipulation environments automate model operations such as model consistency checking and model transformation. A number of external model manipulation Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) have been proposed, in particular for the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). While their higher levels of abstraction result in gains in expressiveness over gen...

Although model-driven engineering (MDE) is now an established approach for developing complex software systems, it has not been universally adopted by the software industry. In order to better understand the reasons for this, as well as to identify future opportunities for MDE, we carried out a week-long design thinking experiment with 15 MDE exper...

Teaching software engineering is an activity that needs to constantly evolve to cope with new paradigms, principles and techniques. In this paper, we briefly report on several years of experience in teaching both generative techniques in a model-driven engineering context and variability modeling related to software-product line engineering. Our cu...

Feature modeling is a popular Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) technique used to describe variability in a product family. A usable feature modeling tool environment should enable SPLE practitioners to produce good quality models, in particular, models that effectively communicate modeled information. FAMILIAR is a text-based environment fo...

As Software Product Lines (SPLs) are now more widely applied in new application fields such as IT or Web systems, complex and large-scale configurations have to be handled. In these fields, the strong domain orientation leads to the need to manage interrelated SPLs and multiple instances of configured sub-products, resulting in complex configuratio...

Part of the Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations (STAF) 2014 federated conferences

In the context of the Internet of Things, sensors are surrounding our environment. These small pieces of electronics are inserted in everyday life’s elements (e.g., cars, doors, radiators, smartphones) and continuously collect information about their environment. One of the biggest challenges is to support the development of accurate monitoring das...

Control theory provides solid foundations for develop-ing reliable and scalable feedback control for software systems. Although, feedback controllers have been ac-knowledged to efficiently solve common classes of prob-lems, their adoption by state-of-the-art approaches for designing self-adaptation in legacy software systems re-mains limited and at...

This chapter presents the various applications of a set of modular management variability tools (feature model script language for manipulation and automatic reasoning (FAMILIAR)) for different forms of architecture (component, service and plugin based), and at different stages of the software lifecycle, and discusses notions of software production...

External or internal domain-specific languages (DSLs) or (fluent) APIs? Whoever you are -- a developer or a user of a DSL -- you usually have to choose your side; you should not! What about metamorphic DSLs that change their shape according to your needs? We report on our 4-years journey of providing the "right" support (in the domain of feature mo...

SpineFM est un outil issu de travaux de recherche sur l’utilisation de lignes de produits logiciels multiples. TOCSIN est l’interface graphique permettant d’exploiter SpineFM.SpineFM se base sur un modèle du domaine défini en EMF et des feature model exploitables par l’outil FAMILIAR afin de définir une ligne de produits logiciels multiples. Des al...

A common approach for engineering self-adaptive software systems is to use Feedback Control Loops (FCLs). Advances have led to more explicit and safer design of some control architectures, however, there is a need for more integrated and systematic approaches that support end-to-end integration of FCLs into software systems. In this paper, we propo...

In Model-Driven Engineering, a number of external Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) for model manipulation have been proposed. However, they require users to learn new lan-guages that, together with their execution performance, us-ability and tool support limitations, can significantly con-tribute to accidental complexities. In this paper, we present...

The Computer Science department of the University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis is offering a course dedicated to Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) in its graduate curriculum. This course exists since 2006, and was usually badly perceived by students, despite many reorganizations of both course contents and teaching methods. This paper is an experience r...

Variability management is a key issue when building and evolving software-intensive systems, making it possible to extend, configure, customize and adapt such systems to customers’ needs and specific deployment contexts. A wide form of variability can be found in extensible software systems, typically built on top of plugin-based architectures that...

Modeling and managing variability is a key activity in a growing number of software engineering contexts. Support for composing variability models is arising in many engineering scenarios, for instance, when several subsystems or modeling artifacts, each coming with their own variability and possibly developed by different stakeholders, should be c...

Feature models (FMs) are a popular formalism to describe the commonality and variability of a set of assets in a software product line (SPL). SPLs usually involve large and complex FMs that describe thousands of features whose legal combinations are governed by many and often complex rules. The size and complexity of these models is partly explaine...

Managing in a generic way the evolution process of feature-oriented Software Product Lines (spls) is complex due to the number of elements that are impacted and the heterogeneity of the spls regarding artifacts used to define them. Existing work presents specific approaches to manage the evolution of spls in terms of such artifacts, i.e., assets, f...

This paper presents a feature-oriented approach to requirement and design modeling using the FAMILIAR Domain Specific Language. This language is aimed at being used within different phases of software development, from early requirement definition to high-level design and in certain cases until runtime. Some experiments also demonstrate its usage w...

The feature model formalism has become the de facto standard for managing variability in software product lines (SPLs). In practice, developing an SPL can involve modeling a large number of features representing different viewpoints, sub-systems or concerns of the software system. This activity is generally tedious and error-prone. In this article,...

As Software Product Lines (SPL) are inevitably moving towards a multiple form to tackle issues of reuse and complexity, variability management across the composed SPLs is still addressed with basic inter-constraints. Based on two disjoint case studies (digital signage and cloud computing), we identified this challenging problem for the SPL communit...

The Comparing Modeling Approaches (CMA) workshop series aims at providing a common relevant case study and a growing collection of criteria to compare different modeling approaches, from aspect-oriented to object-oriented and beyond. Among criteria to be defined and integrated, scalability is particularly relevant as the Model-Driven Engineering co...

Managing continuous change in a Software Product Line (SPL) is one of the challenges now faced by the SPL engineering community. On the one hand, the SPL paradigm captures the intrinsic variability of a software based on a systemic vision of the software to model. On the other hand, Agile Software Development advocates the incremental development o...

The development of scientific workflows is evolving toward the systematic use of service-oriented architectures, enabling the composition of dedicated and highly parameterized software services into processing pipelines. Building consistent workflows then becomes a cumbersome and error-prone activity as users cannot manage such large-scale variabil...

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is widely used to enrich modeling languages with structural constraints, side effect free query operations implementation and contracts. OCL was designed to be small and compact language with appealing short "to-the-point" expressions. When trying to apply it to larger EMF models some shortcomings appear in the...

Engineering self-adaptive systems is a particularly challenging problem. On the one hand, it is hard to develop the right control model that drives the adaptation; on the other hand, the implementation and integration of this control model into the target system is a difficult and an error-prone activity. Models@runtime is a promising approach to m...

In this document we present the main issues that we have to face in order to define a Software Product Line (SPL) for Broadcasting Systems. These issues were identified through requirement analysis and refactoring of SEDUITE which are described in two internal deliverables: a) D.2.2.1: Introduces the requirements (functional and non-functional) of...

Feature models are a widespread means to represent commonality and variability in software product lines. As is the case for other kinds of models, computing and managing feature model differences is useful in various real-world situations. In this paper, we propose a set of novel differencing techniques that combine syntactic and semantic mechanis...

Feature models (FMs) are the de facto standard for modeling variability of software product lines. The research effort is still intensive and aims at increasing the adoption of FMs in practice. Integrated solutions that combine state-of-the-art techniques, languages, and tools are emerging. We give an overview of complementary languages, TVL and FA...