Strategy for Modeling Variability in Configurable Software

Abstract

An environment involving large scale development has a tendency to repeatedly designing functional blocks amongst different groups from several domains. To avoid at least a part of these problems a general architecture can be planned within an organization to facilitate reuse. This offers benefits such as cost savings, lower redundancy, improved productivity and quality. Complexity increases significantly with use or reuse of external blocks, as they may not adhere to the internal architecture. Major challenges are in identifying the commonality of functionality, where the designs involve variability (ability to customize) within these blocks. The concept of a Software Product Line (SPL) largely addresses this issue. But in addition to variants, their versions/releases also play an important role for effective management over the entire product cycle from concept, design, development, and test up to after sales maintenance. Moreover, to reduce the development time, processes to assist team members when choosing a component from the core assets are essential.Our proposal is based on the work with the industrial design tool named ESCAPE. It addresses the issues to identify commonality based on architecture, functionality and naming conventions in identification, specification and realization of variants within a product development as well as to assist the development team. As this tool in the discussed aspect follows the practices commonly used in industry, it can be seen as an example without limiting the general validity of the proposed process for variability management.