Handling Variability in Software Architecture: Problems and Implications

Change-Impact Driven Agile Architecting

“…The variability of a PPC is specified using variability points, which hook fragments of code to the PPC known as variants, and weavings which specify where and when extending the PPCs using the variants (see Figure l.a). As variability facilitates the planned evolutionary software development [15], agile architects can take advantage of the PPC primitives for incrementally and iteratively refine the architectural components that compose a working architecture 3 [23]. The PPC variability mechanism is the backbone to support incremental development of architectural components through the incomplete specification of components, and their extension by hooking new variants.…”

On integrating student empirical software engineering studies with research and teaching goals

“…Data was collected through paper based pre-questionnaires, post-questionnaires, and through worksheets that recorded work results delivered by students. The study has been published at the 9th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture [12] in 201 1.…”

Variability viewpoint for introducing variability in software architecture viewpoints

“…In [5] the authors describe the result of an exploratory study in which eleven major problems based on variability-related tasks were performed by participants. The paper discusses the implications of these problems on architecture description, methods and tools, and training of architects.…”

“…Variability is the ability of a software artifact to be configured, customized, extended, or changed for a specific context, in a preplanned manner [1]. As such, to facilitate the instantiation of a software architecture, variability concerns need to be explicitly addressed [4] [5]. A common practice is to model different architectural views for describing the architecture according to the stakeholders' concerns [2].…”

“…On the other hand, existing integrated variability approaches [6] are usually fixed to a given design language or viewpoint. To represent variability concerns more explicitly, preferably an architectural view is required to model the architecture based on the required variability properties [5]. In this paper we first provide an overview of the approaches for dealing with variability at the architecture design level and then introduce the variability viewpoint.…”