A customizable approach to full lifecycle variability management

Abstract

In order to enable a smooth transition to product development for an organization that so far did only perform single system development, it is necessary to keep as much of the existing notations and approaches in place as possible. This requires adaptability of the basic variability management approach to the specific situation at hand. In this paper we describe an approach that enables homogenous variability management across the different life-cycle stages, independent of the specific notation. The approach is accompanied by a meta-model and a process for introducing the variability management approach by developing a notation-independant representation. This approach has so far been applied in several cases where our Product Line engineering method PuLSE has been introduced into a software development organization

FLAME: a formal framework for the automated analysis of software product lines validated by automated specification testing

“…There is another family of VMLs known as decision models [58,57,21] that could be formalized using FLAME. Formalizing concepts for decisions models would be possible if we follow the approach described in [23], which allows transforming FMs to decision models and backwards, leading to the development of a CML for decision models.…”

Software diversity: state of the art and perspectives

“…In the simplest approaches decisions can only lead to setting other decisions [21]. Other approaches allow rather complex combinations of formulas and conditions as a basis for determining the restrictions in making decisions [66] or explicitly support set-based descriptions [200]. The different decision modeling approaches address the relationship of decisions to the reusable artifacts in a system in different ways.…”

“…The different decision modeling approaches address the relationship of decisions to the reusable artifacts in a system in different ways. Decisions are either referenced from the artifacts [45,200] or they reference artifacts themselves [21].…”

“…They typically relate decisions or features to variation points (locations in artifacts where variability occurs). Schmid and John [200] provide a set of artifact-notation-independent primitives for expressing variability in artifacts, such as optionality, alternative, set selection, and value reference. Some approaches associate artifacts with inclusion or application conditions (e.g., [58,103,66,49,197]), and some associate features or decisions with the artifacts to be included (e.g., [21]).…”

Model-Driven Engineering for Software Product Lines

“…Another proposal comes from Schmid and John [77] and is an extension of the original Synthesis approach. It adds binding times, set-typed relations, selector types, mapping selector types to specific notations, using multiplicity to allow the selection of subsets of possible resolutions, clear separation of constraints on the presence and value of decisions.…”