Reducing Enterprise Product Line Architecture Deployment and Testing Costs via Model Driven Deployment, Configuration, and Testing

Product-line architectures (PLAs) 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, which may have scores of valid variants that can be constructed from the architecture’s components. It is crucial that each variant be tested thoroughly to assure the quality of these applications on multiple platforms and hardware configurations. It is tedious and error-prone, however, to setup numerous distributed test environments manually and ensure they are deployed and configured correctly. To simplify and automate this process, we present FireAnt, which is a tool for the model-driven development (MDD) of PLA deployment and testing plans. To validate FireAnt, we use a distributed constraints optimization system case study to illustrate the cost savings of using an MDD approach for the deployment and testing of PLAs.