Boucher Q., Perrouin G., Davril JM., Heymans P. (2017) Engineering Configuration Graphical User Interfaces from Variability Models. In : Sottet JS., García Frey A., Vanderdonckt J. (eds) Human Centered Software Product Lines. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham
In the past, companies produced large amounts of products through mass production lines. Advantages of such an approach are reduced production costs and time-to-market. While it is (still) appropriate for some goods like food or household items, customer preferences evolve to customised products. In a more and more competitive environment, product customisation is taken to the extreme by companies in order to gain market share. Companies provide customisation tools, more commonly called product configurators, to assist their staff and customers in deciding upon the characteristics of the product to be delivered.
Our experience reveals that some existing configurators are implemented in an ad-hoc fashion. This is especially cumbersome when numerous and non-trivial constraints have to be dealt with. For instance, we have observed in two industrial cases that relationships between configuration options are hard-coded and mixed with GUI code. As constraints are scattered in the source code, severe maintenance issues occur.
In this chapter, we present a pragmatic and model-driven way to generate configuration GUIs. We rely on feature models to represent and reason about the configuration options and their complex relationships. Once feature models have been elaborated, there is still a need to produce a GUI, including the integration with underlying reasoning mechanisms to control and update the GUI elements. We present a model-view-presenter architecture to design configurators, which separates concerns between a feature model (configuration option modelling), its associated solver (automated reasoning support) and the presentation of the GUI. To fill the gap between feature models and configuration GUIs, the various constructs of the feature model formalism are rendered as GUI elements through model transformations. Those transformations can be parametrised through beautification and view languages to derive specific configuration GUIs. We illustrate our approach on an IPv6 addressing plan configurator.
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