Towards a General Model of Variability in Product Families

The increasing amount of variability in software systems meanwhile leads to a situation where the complexity of variability management becomes a primary concern during software development. Whereas sound methodic support to analyze and specify variability on an abstract level is already available, the corresponding support on realization level is still lacking. The goal of this paper is to pave the way towards more systematic and consequently more efficient approaches to manage variability. To this end, it discusses the different motivations for variability in product families and the interrelationships between the specification and realization of variability. The paper further identifies appropriate concepts and interrelates them in form of a general model of variability in product families. In addition to this meta-model, the paper outlines an instantiation of the model: our language to specify variability in product family assets.

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