Quality driven approach for product line architecture customization in patient navigation program software product line

Abstract

Patient Navigation Program (PNP) is considered as an important implementation of health care systems that can assist in patient’s treatment. Due to the feasibility of PNP implementation, a systematic reuse is needed for a wide adoption of PNP computerized system. SPL is one of the promising systematic reuse approaches for creating a reusable architecture to enabled reuse in several similar applications of PNP systems which has its own variations with other applications. However, stakeholder decision making which result from the imprecise, uncertain, and subjective nature of architecture selection based on quality attributes (QA) further hinders the development of the product line architecture. Therefore, this study aims to propose a quality-driven approach using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) techniques for Software Product Line Architecture (SPLA) to have an objective selection based on the QA of stakeholders in the domain of PNP. There are two steps proposed to this approach. First, a clear representation of quality is proposed by extending feature model (FM) with QA feature to determine the QA in the early phase of architecture selection. Second, MCDA techniques were applied for architecture selection based on objective preference for certain QA in the domain of PNP. The result of the proposed approach is the implementation of the PNP system with SPLA that had been selected using MCDA techniques. Evaluation for the approach is done by checking the approach’s applicability in a case study and stakeholder validation. Evaluation on ease of use and usefulness of the approach with selected stakeholders have shown positive responses. The evaluation results proved that the proposed approach assisted in the implementation of PNP systems.