Seamless development of software product lines

One of the key problems in the development of software product lines is the representation and management of variability and commonality. The customary way to define both aspects is by means of feature models that also allow the configuration of each specific application within the product line to be selected. However the control of traceability between the features and the architectural models (generally based on UML) is not simple. The fundamental reasons are the complexity of the traceability relationships, and the fact that the same modeling mechanisms (e.g., the specialization in a class diagram) serve to express the variation points in the models that represent the product line and in each specific application. The aim of this work is to use the package merge mechanism of the UML 2 infrastructure meta-model as the representation (and support for the configuration) of the variability in the product line while reserving the classical mechanisms (the specialization in the structural models, the <<extends>> relationship in the use case models, etc.) to express the variants in execution time of each specific application. The structure of the feature models is directly reflected in the relationships between packages in the architectural models, so the traceability of the configuration decisions is straightforward. The direct implementation of the package merge mechanism using the facility of partial classes of languages such as C# is an additional advantage that leads to the ideal of "seamless development".