ContextVariability management (VM) is one of the most important activities of software product-line engineering (SPLE), which intends to develop software-intensive systems using platforms and mass customization. VM encompasses the activities of eliciting and representing variability in software artefacts, establishing and managing dependencies among different variabilities, and supporting the exploitation of the variabilities for building and evolving a family of software systems. Software product line (SPL) community has allocated huge amount of effort to develop various approaches to dealing with variability related challenges during the last two decade. Several dozens of VM approaches have been reported. However, there has been no systematic effort to study how the reported VM approaches have been evaluated. ObjectiveThe objectives of this research are to review the status of evaluation of reported VM approaches and to synthesize the available evidence about the effects of the reported approaches. MethodWe carried out a systematic literature review of the VM approaches in SPLE reported from 1990s until December 2007. ResultsWe selected 97 papers according to our inclusion and exclusion criteria. The selected papers appeared in 56 publication venues. We found that only a small number of the reviewed approaches had been evaluated using rigorous scientific methods. A detailed investigation of the reviewed studies employing empirical research methods revealed significant quality deficiencies in various aspects of the used quality assessment criteria. The synthesis of the available evidence showed that all studies, except one, reported only positive effects. ConclusionThe findings from this systematic review show that a large majority of the reported VM approaches have not been sufficiently evaluated using scientifically rigorous methods. The available evidence is sparse and the quality of the presented evidence is quite low. The findings highlight the areas in need of improvement, i.e., rigorous evaluation of VM approaches. However, the reported evidence is quite consistent across different studies. That means the proposed approaches may be very beneficial when they are applied properly in appropriate situations. Hence, it can be concluded that further investigations need to pay more attention to the contexts under which different approaches can be more beneficial.

https://ulir.ul.ie/bitstream/handle/10344/1785/2011_Chen.pdf?sequence=2

A systematic review of evaluation of variability management approaches in software product lines

Industrial plants are operated a long period of time. Hence, evolution of these plants is necessary to cope with technological developments or market requests. However, evolution cycles of disciplines involved in cooperative design of such plants are different. Therefore, further research needs to be investigated in order to provide an integrated variant and version management, i.e. evolution management, of such plants. As a first step towards solving this issue, this paper presents an abstract model for industrial plant evolution and analyses it using a detailed case study in the industrial plant automation domain.

Evolution in industrial plant automation: A case study

This paper presents SMarty, a variability management approach for UML- based software product lines (PL) SMarty is supported by a UML profile, the SMar- tyProfile, and a process for managing variabilities, the SMartyProcess SMartyProfile aims at representing variabilities, variation points, and variants in UML models by applying a set of stereotypes SMartyProcess consists of a set of activities that is systematically executed to trace, identify, and control variabilities in a PL based on SMarty It also identifies variability implementation mechanisms and analyzes specific product configurations In addition, a more comprehensive application of SMarty is presented using SEI's Arcade Game Maker PL An evaluation of SMarty and related work are discussed

/pdf/systematic-management-of-variability-in-uml-based-software-2z7jn8ps6f.pdf

Systematic Management of Variability in UML-based Software Product Lines

Modeling variability in the context of software product-lines has been around for about 25 years in the research community. It started with Feature Modeling and soon enough was extended to handle many different concerns. Beyond being used for a mere description and documentation of variability, variability models are more and more leveraged to produce other artifacts, such as configurators, code, or test cases. This paper overviews several classification dimensions of variability modeling and explores how do they fit with such artifact production purposes.

/pdf/model-driven-engineering-for-software-product-lines-58onstl0tj.pdf

Model-Driven Engineering for Software Product Lines

The term domain engineering has different meanings. In software engineering it is used for describing the software relevant features of the domain for which software is developed. In general the term de notes the act of creating the domain itself, including its artifacts. The paper a rgues that the use of the term in software engineering is not a happy choice and cont ributes to the terminological confusion often observed when disciplines meet in multi-disciplinary projects.

/pdf/domain-engineering-what-is-it-4d7k0fnykt.pdf

Domain Engineering: What is it?

The software product line approach (PL) promotes the generation of specific products from a set of core assets for a given domain. This approach is applicable to domains in which products have well-defined commonalities and variation points. Variability management is concerned with the management of the differences between products throughout the PL lifecycle. This paper presents a UML-based process for variability management that allows identification, representation and delimitation of variabilities as well as identification of mechanisms for variability implementation. The process is illustrated with excerpts of a case study carried out within the context of an existing PL for the Workflow Management System (WfMS) domain. The case study was carried out based on the experimental software engineering concepts. The results have shown that the proposed process has made explicit a higher number of variabilities than does the existing PL process, and it offers better support for variability tracing.

Junior Edson Alves de Oliveira

Papers

A variability management process for software product lines