Decision Tables as a Tool for Product Line Comprehension

LEGOM is an application, on the market from three years, that supports the legal office of a bank or an insurance company in solving credit return problems related to high risk customers. Its application domain is characterized by conceptual differences among its set of interested stakeholders. For this reason, once on the market many specializations have been done, leading inevitably to many versions of the application. In this context, the application itself became difficult in terms of configuration management, maintenance and identification of the most appropriate “existing version” suitable for customer needs. So, the SME decided to migrate the application to a product line characterized by a core common part and a set of variants, each identified by a set of parameters. It was therefore possible to formalize all of the existing versions of LEGOM. Once identified all parts, the relations between parameters, common and variant parts were formalized in a decision table. The efficacy of such a decision tool was then evaluated. Moreover, after transforming the versions of LEGOM into a product line, the SME submitted a survey to their stakeholders with the aim of verifying whether the decision table was able to identify all of the specializations and variants requested by each stakeholder. Results of the survey show how the product line version of LEGOM is comprehensible for developers in the SME and for stakeholders in that it explicitly formalizes its components and easily leads to identification of the variant parts that make up the final product.