An Enhanced Scalable Design Approach for Managing Large Scale Variability in Software Product Lines (SPLs)

Abstract

Variability management remained the main challenge for software product line (SPL) adoption since it needs to be efficiently managed at different levels of the SPL development process (for example, requirements analysis, software design, implementation etc.). With the increase in size and complexity of product lines, and the more holistic systems approach to the design process, managing ever-growing variability models has become a challenge and more difficult to handle. Accordingly, tool support for variability management has been gathering increasing momentum over the last two decades and can be considered a key success factor for developing and maintaining SPLs. This work presents a new tool support that exhibits a number of features that enable it to deal with large models. The new tool adopts the Separation of Concerns design principle by providing multiple perspectives to the model, each conveying a different set of information. It can comprise more than 1000 features particularly, showing the browser (structural) View, which is displayed using a mind-mapping visualisation technique (Hyperbolic trees); the development/Edit view where a new feature can be created either based on existing feature or from scratch; the business view where the information related to the project management, cost/benefit analysis, close/open sets of features and others are presented and the dependency view which is displayed graphically using logic gates.