On the notion of variability in software product lines

By Jilles van Gurp, Jan Bosch, Mikael Svahnberg. Proceedings Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture, 2001

635 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The authors discuss the notion of variability. We have experienced that this concept has so far been underdefined, although we have observed that variability techniques become increasingly important. A clear indication of this trend is the recent emergence of software product lines. Software product lines are large, industrial software systems intended to specialize into specific software products. The authors provide a framework of terminology and concepts regarding variability. In addition, they present three recurring patterns of variability. Finally, they suggest a method for managing variability in software product lines.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf85d6ffff86f2064369fe526f289f231c20109e

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Citations in the corpus

Generic semantics of feature diagrams (2007, methodology): “OFT, the first ever FD, were introduced as part of the Feature Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA) method [18].”
A taxonomy of variability realization techniques (2005, methodology): “• The Mozilla web browser [ 12 ][38][39] (presented in Section 4.3)”
Formalizing cardinality-based feature models and their specialization (2005, background): “Other extensions such as consists-of or isgeneralization-of relationships between features (Griss et al., 1998; van Gurp et al., 2001; Lee et al., 2002), as well as additional information on features such as descriptions, categories, binding time, priorities, stakeholders, exemplar systems, etc., ”
Staged Configuration Using Feature Models (2004, background): “Based on this growing experience, a number of extensions and variants of the original FODA notation have been proposed [10,14,15,16,11,17,13].”
Automated Reasoning on Feature Models (2005, methodology): “Moreover, current feature models are only focused on modelling functional features and in the most quoted proposals [7, 9, 11, 13, 22] there is a lack of modelling artifacts that deal with extra–functional features (features related to so–called quality or non–functional features).”
Staged configuration through specialization and multilevel configuration of feature models (2005, background): “Several authors (e.g., Griss et al., 1998; van Gurp et al., 2001; Lee et al., 2002) proposed to extend feature models with different kinds of relationships such as consists-of or is-generalizationof.”
Feature Diagrams: A Survey and a Formal Semantics (2006, methodology): “Since Kang et ale's initial proposal, several extensions of OFT have been devised as part of the following methods: FORM [ 131, FeatureRSEB [ 101, Generative Programming [7], PLUSS [8], and in the work of the following authors: Riebisch et al. [19, 181, van Gurp et al. [ 24 ], van Deursen et al. [23”