A software product line Web user interface modeling language

Software product line (SPL) is a software engineering paradigm for software development. This software development paradigm leverages the reuse of core assets, often including a specification or design model having variation points in various dimensions, such as functionality, presentation, layout, style, and interaction. Features in these different dimensions are termed "variant features" in the SPL. A software product within a SPL often has specific features in these dimensions that are not common to all other products within the SPL. Such a product derived from the core assets has specialized realizations of these variant features (variation points). Therefore, the SPL paradigm involves the modeling of such variant features. However, little work in SPL has investigated or addressed the modeling of variant features specific to user interfaces (UI). This lack of work is serious because a great deal of product development effort (Myers, 1989) is consumed in that development phase focusing upon customization of UIs.; Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the de facto modeling language for object-oriented software systems. It is known that UML needs better support in modeling UIs. Thus, current research has developed UML, sometimes ad hoc, extensions to improve UML support in modeling UIs. Yet, there still is a problem of not having significant productivity enhancements by integrating SPL paradigm using a systematic UML extension for UI modeling. This dissertation reports on research of a new UML extension, namely Web User Interface Modeling Language (WUIML), to address this research problem. To assist the utilization of WUIML, this dissertation also reports on research of a software engineering process, called Web User Interface Modeling Process (WUIMP). WUIMP defines the 'who, what, when, where, why, and how' in making use of WUIML. WUIML defines elements for modeling variant features specific to UIs for Web-based SPLs. The model elements in WUIML extend from the metaclass of the UML2.0 metamodel. WUIML integrates the modeling of variant features specific to UIs to UML. For example, in a Web-based patient registration SPL, member products targeting British users may use a British date format in the user interface, while member products targeting United States users may use a United States date format in the user interface. Thus, the UI for the address format is a variant feature for this SPL. WUIML defines a model element, XOR, to represent such exclusive-or conditions in a SPL UI model. WUIML reduces SPL engineers' efforts in UI development.; To validate the WUIML research outcome, case studies were conducted. The results of this empirical study indicate that modeling UIs for Web-based SPLs using WUIML is more effective and efficient than using standard UML approach.