A software product line process simulator

Organizations are moving towards the use of software product line approaches to build product families. Cases have shown that software product line approaches can reduce time-to-market (TTM), costs, and resource usage. However, those benefits are not guaranteed in all situations, as they are affected by many factors including the number of available resources, market demands, reuse rates, and product line adoption and evolution strategies. Before initiating a software product line, an organization needs to evaluate available process options in order to see which ones best fit its goals. The aim of this research is to help this decision-making process by providing practical approaches and tools. In this article, a process evaluation approach is proposed, a process meta-model is introduced, and a product line process simulator is presented. The approach contains three steps: process definition, simulation, and evaluation. The process meta-model is used for defining software product line processes. The simulator can predict the development costs, schedule, and resource usage rates for a selected software product line process at a high level. The simulator uses DEVSJAVA as the modeling and simulation formalism and COPLOMO as the cost model. An example is also given and some simulation results are discussed.