Defining families: the commonality analysis (tutorial)

A recent trend in both the software engineering research and industrial communities has been to seek ways systematically to engineer software domains. One approach is to develop families of software and to invest in facilities for rapidly producing family members. Success in such an endeavor requires that the software engineers be able to identify the desired family members. This tutorial describes the commonality analysis process, a systematic approach to analyzing families. Commonality analysis was developed at Bell Labs and is being tried in Lucent Technologies as part of a process for engineering domains that is known as family-oriented abstraction, specification, and translation (FAST). The result of the analysis forms the basis for designing reusable assets that can be used to produce rapidly family members. The tutorial teaches the participants the principles underlying the approach and gives them a chance to perform a practice commonality analysis guided by experienced users of the process.