FireAnt: a tool for reducing enterprise product line architecture deployment, configuration, and testing costs

Abstract

Product-line architectures (PLA)s are a paradigm for developing software families by customizing and composing reusable artifacts, rather than handcrafting software from scratch. Extensive testing is required to develop reliable PLAs. Each PLA may have hundreds of valid variants that can be constructed from the architecture's components. It is crucial that each of these variants be thoroughly tested to ensure the quality of these applications on multiple OS platforms and hardware configurations. Setting up test environments and running tests can become extremely complex and expensive as the number of variants and the complexity of their deployment and configuration increases. Once a variant is deemed ready for deployment and configuration in a production environment, it is crucial that these activities be done identically to the tested configurations and upholds the assumptions of the component developers. Rapidly setting up numerous distributed test environments and ensuring that they are deployed and configured correctly is hard. This poster paper presents FireAnt, which is a tool for the model-driven development (MDD) of PLA deployment plans