Model-driven Continuous Experimentation on Component-based Software Architectures

To build successful software products, developers continuously have to discover what features the users really need. This discovery can be achieved with continuous experimentation, testing different software variants with distinct user groups, and deploying the superior variant for all users. However, existing approaches do not focus on explicit modeling of variants and experiments, which offers advantages such as traceability of decisions and combinability of experiments. Therefore, our vision is the provision of model-driven continuous experimentation, which provides the developer with a framework for structuring the experimentation process. For that, we introduce the overall concept, apply it to the experimentation on component-based software architectures and point out future research questions. In particular, we show the applicability by combining feature models for modeling the software variants, users, and experiments (i.e., model-driven) with MAPE-K for the adaptation (i.e., continuous experimentation) and implementing the concept based on the component-based Angular framework.