Modelling Dependencies between Variation Points in Use Case Diagrams

Software product family variability facilitates the constructive and pro-active reuse of assets during the development of software applications. The variability is typically represented by variation points, the variants and their interdependencies. Those variation points and their variants have to be considered when defining the requirements for the applications of the software product family. To facilitate the communication of the variability to the customer, an extension to UML-use case diagrams has been proposed in [9]. In this paper we identify common dependency types used within the feature modelling community to express interdependencies between variation points and variants. We then propose a differentiation of those interdependencies to be used to reduce complexity and to facilitate selective retrieval of interdependencies between variation points and the variants. Finally, we extend the notations proposed in [9] for representing interdependencies between variation points and variants in use case diagrams and use a simple example to illustrate those extensions.