Development of software product families relies heavily on the use of variability to manage the differences between products by delaying design decisions to later stages of the development and usage of the constructed software systems. Implementation of variability is not a trivial task, and is governed by a number of factors. In this paper, we describe the factors that are relevant in determining how to implement variability, and present a taxonomy of variability realization techniques.

Software product lines are used in companies to provide a set of reusable assets for related groups of software products. Generally a software product line provides a common architecture and reusable code for software product developers. In this article we focus on mechanisms that help developers vary the architecture and behavior of a software product line to create individual products. We provide the reader with a framework of terminology and concepts that help understand the concept of variability better. In addition, we present a number of variability mechanisms in the context of this framework. Finally, we provide a method for incorporating variability into software product lines. 2 Features Products in a product family tend to vary. The differences between the products can be described in terms of features. To better understand variability we need to be able to describe these differences on a high level. We

An important task in Requirements Engineering is to select which requirements that should go into a specific release of a system. This is a complex decision that requires balancing multiple perspectives against each other. In this article we investigate what students imagine is important to professionals in requirements selection. The reason for this is to understand whether the students are able to picture what industry professionals value, and whether the courses allow them to picture the state of industry practice. The results indicate that students have a good understanding of the way industry acts in the context of requirements selection, and students may work well as subjects in empirical studies in this area.

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