Adoption of Software Product Line to a Voice User Interface Environment Diógenes R. F. Oliveira, Byron L. D. Bezerra, Elyda L. S. X. Freitas, Alexandre M. A. Maciel Polytechnic School of Pernambuco – University of Pernambuco Recife, Brazil {drfo, byronleite, amam}@ecomp.poli.br, elyda.freitas@upe.br Abstract — Software Product Line is a software development paradigm created to meet different market segments. This paradigm has shown great acceptance in the corporate environment (Motorola, Nokia, and Hewlett Packard) to allow the construction of more efficiently through reusing common components applications, besides being extensively researched by academics. The segment of voice interface, in turn, came up with the demand for systems capable of interacting with users, but in the application development process for this domain there is a lack of tools that make the task more productively. The FIVE (Framework for an Integrated Voice Environment) is a development environment for Voice Interface products designed to increase productivity in this segment. This paper aims to apply a SPL approach to FIVE. For this, a comparative evaluation of the process of construction of FIVE and SPL platforms was performed. Then adjustments in order to correct structural problems and, finally, the framework was validated using a set of experiments which sought to ensure the confirmation of such changes have been made. Keywords: Experience Report,s Software Product Line; Voice User Interface. I. INTRODUCTION In recent years, the area of Voice User Interface (VUI) has received great attention from academics, for two main reasons: first, due to improvements in the performance of automatic speech processing systems, including speech recognition and speech synthesis; secondly, due to convergence device and mass production of multimedia content, which requires means of user interaction faster and efficiency [1]. According to Huang et al. [2], the typical architecture for the development of VUI has three components: the first represents the set of engines responsible for the speech recognition or the speech synthesis; the second consists of a API (Application Programming Interface) used to facilitate communication between engines and applications; and the last one consists of a set of possible applications. This architecture has guided this area over the years and many resources have been created with the aim to assist in this process. Much has been done, both academia and in industry to provide improvements in speech recognition rates and speech synthesis naturalness, however, little effort has been made to bring these advances at the application level. Given this scenario, was developed the FIVE (Framework for an Integrated Voice Environment) in order to assist in speech engines building and in instantiation of them in different technological environments (Telephone, Mobile, SmartTV) [3]. The FIVE has been used by the company Vocal Lab in a real development environment. With him, the time-to-market was considerably reduces and enable the mass development of products with voice interface. The Voc Refactoring the Environment al Lab, offers a products family for speech recognition (VL Recognizer), speech synthesis (VL Synthesizer) and speaker verification (VL Identificator). According to Pohl [5] Software Product Line (SPL) is a set of software systems that have a certain set of features in common, and meet the needs of a particular market segment or mission and are developed with the same core assets. Although it is not explicit in the original work of Maciel [4], FIVE presents a SPL behavior, however, various features of SPL presents some problems inherent in this approach, as:  Lack of variability management, which causes a lack of control of altered or removed features;  Severe failure of the features configuration, generating products with errors and / or locking tool.  No identification of features, preventing management for maintenance and evolution. Given these problems, FIVE does not function properly as SPL in all family products. This leads to lost productivity, reducing the potential of time-to-market as suggested by the tool. In this sense, this paper aims to propose the adoption of Software Product Line approach in FIVE. For this, this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides a background to the literature of SPL adoption. Section 3 shows adoption process. Section 4 shows the experiments performed for the FIVE and his adaptation to the concepts of SPL and finally section 5 describes conclusions. II. SOFTWARE PRODUCT LINE ADOPTION The adoption the SPL concept emerged together with the practice of software reuse. In 1983, Doe and Bersoff [6] presented the software industry an initiative to increase productivity and quality by creating an environment composed of techniques and tools to assist the process of software development with reuse. The literature on the adoption of software product line is enough extensive. Bosch [7] reports the adoption of alternatives is generally much more diverse than those presented in the literature and the technical and DOI reference number: 10.18293/SEKE2015-185