Distributed Game Environment : A Software Product Line for Education and Research

Sammanfattning: A software product line is a set of software-intensive systems that share a common, managed set of features satisfying the specific needs of a particular market segment or demand. Software product lines capitalize commonality and manage variation to reduce the time, effort, cost and complexity when creating and maintaining products in a product line. Therefore reusing core assets, software product line can address problems such as cost, time-to-market, quality, complexity of developing and maintaining variants, and need to quickly respond to market’s demands. The development of a software product line is different from conventional software development and in the area of education and research of product line there is a lack of a suitable purposefully designed and developed software product line (SPL) that can be used for educational or research purposes. In this thesis we have developed a software product line for turn-based two players distributed board games environment that can be used for educational and research purposes. The software product line supports dynamic runtime update, including games, chat, and security features, via OSGi framework. Furthermore, it supports remote gameplay via local area network and dynamic runtime activity recovery. We delivered a product configuration tool that is used to derive and configure products from the core assets based on feature selection. We have also modeled the software product line’s features and documented its requirements, architecture and user guides. Furthermore, we performed functional and integration tests of the software product line to ensure that the requirements are met according to the requirements specification prescribed by the stakeholders.