Automated Software configuration: the product line approach

: an application to conference management websites

Abstract

The active researchers and engineers in diversified domains need to communicate, to archive the obtained results and to state their advances. At this end, they publish articles in specialist magazines or participate at scientific conferences, which take generally place annually. The organization of these last ones passes in particular by the creation of a website presenting the practical modalities. However, the organizers have generally not enough time to dedicate to this task. The conferences have a well defined organization and have recurring operating modes. This last characteristic is typical of software product line. Thanks to this approach, we can envisage the automation of the creation of a product, namely, in our case, a website of conference. In this master thesis, we present two approaches allowing to automate the creation of a website of conference to lighten the time dedicated to this task. These two approaches have totally opposite optics: the first one proposes a graphical interface allowing to guide users in their choices and the second one, more technical, allows to select the characteristics directly on a feature diagram. On basis of the collected information, they generate automatically the website of conference. Beyond these two solutions, our contribution will be also supported by the comparison of these two methods in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses. On basis of the results, we shall present a unified approach.

Date of Award	2009
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Supervisor	Patrick Heymans (Supervisor)