Testing activities for software product lines should be different from that of single software systems, due to significant differences between software product line engineering and single software system development. The cost of testing in software product line is generally higher compared with single software systems; therefore, there should exist a certain balance between cost, quality of final products, and the time of performing testing activities. As decreasing testing cost is an important challenge in software product line integration testing, the contribution of this paper is in introducing a method for early integration testing in software product lines based on feature model (FM) by prioritizing test cases in order to decrease integration testing costs in SPLs. In this method, we focus on reusing domain engineering artifacts and prioritized selection and execution of integration test cases. It also uses separation of concerns and pruning techniques on FMs to help prioritize the test cases. The method shows to be promising when applied to some case studies in the sense that it decreases the costs of performing integration test by about 82% and also detects about 44% of integration faults in domain engineering.

Service-Oriented product lines (SOPLs) are dynamic software product lines, in which, the products are developed based on services and service-oriented architecture. Although there are similarities between components and services, there are important differences so that we cannot use component-based product line engineering methods and techniques for SOPL engineering. These differences emerge from the fact that, services can be discovered as black box elements from external repositories. Moreover, services can be dynamically bound and are business-aligned. Therefore, analyzing the conformance of discovered external services with the variability of services in the SOPL - which must be aligned to the variable business needs-is necessary. Variability must be managed, that is, it must be represented (modeled), used (instantiated and capable of conformance checking) and maintained (evolved) over time. Feature Models are insufficient for modeling variability in SOPL, because, services cannot be simply mapped to one or more features, and identification of the mapping depends on knowing the detailed implementation of the services. This research aims at providing an approach to managing the variability in SOPLs so that external services can be involved in the SOPL engineering. This paper presents an overview of the proposal.

One of the key activities needed to construct a quality service-oriented solution is specification of the architectural elements. Selection of an appropriate and proven method for specification of the elements consisted of services, flows, and components is thus fundamental to successful service-oriented system development in an enterprise. Existing methods for service specification ignore the automation capability while providing human-based prescriptive guidelines, which mostly are not applicable at enterprise scales. This paper proposes a novel method called ASSM (Automated Service Specification Method) that automatically specifies the architecturally significant elements of service-oriented systems. Therefore, ASSM effectively specifies the architectural elements of the service models. Model transformations such as ASSM, automate the labor-intensive activities and lead the architect to focus on more important activities, which need human intelligence, and eventually enable efficient development of service-based solutions.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has become an important means to acquire and maintain knowledge about the structure and behavior of the enterprises and to develop the required IT systems. Two main goals in architecture - high flexibility and low complexity- are addressed in a new architectural style called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In this paper, we discuss approaches to have SOA models in the enterprise architecture framework. Based on an analysis of these approaches, we propose an extension to the Zachman Framework called SOEAF, in order to provide the framework with the capability to include service-oriented artifacts representing services aspect of the enterprise. Then we will propose a Model Driven Approach (MDA) to Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture (SOEA), in which, MDA concepts, standards and tools help us achieve a semi-automated service-based analysis and design of the enterprise IT systems. The proposed approach can be very beneficial for increasing efficiency to reach enterprise-wide goals.