Variant management solution for large scale software product lines

Abstract

Application lifecycle management for large scale software product lines (SPL) comes with the challenge to integrate distributed development activities across different parts of an organization and the engineering process in a tool landscape. Variant management is a cross-cutting concern that has interaction points with many of those integrated solutions. At Bosch, two different tools are used for variant management: pure::variants, a feature modeling tool for describing the feature-oriented product decomposition, and the custom tool MIC that offers a more comprehensive set of fine-grained variability management mechanisms. These include parameters, automated configurations or constraints. In turn, it is more suitable for component selection that is done close to the technology. In this experience report, we present a methodological approach on how to use the two tools with a technical integration solution we developed. Its purpose is to serve as an example for establishing successful variant management in large-scale product lines with respect to methodology and tools.