Covamof: A framework for modeling variability in software product families

M Sinnema, S Deelstra, J Nijhuis, J Bosch - Software Product Lines: Third …, 2004 - Springer
M Sinnema, S Deelstra, J Nijhuis, J Bosch
Software Product Lines: Third International Conference, SPLC 2004, Boston, MA …, 2004Springer
A key aspect of variability management in software product families is the explicit
representation of the variability. Experiences at several industrial software development
companies have shown that a software variability model should do four things:(1) uniformly
represent variation points as first-class entities in all abstraction layers (ranging from
features to code),(2) allow for the hierarchical organization of the variability,(3) allow for the
first-class representation of simple (ie, one-to-one) and complex (ie, n-to-m) dependencies …
Abstract
A key aspect of variability management in software product families is the explicit representation of the variability. Experiences at several industrial software development companies have shown that a software variability model should do four things: (1) uniformly represent variation points as first-class entities in all abstraction layers (ranging from features to code), (2) allow for the hierarchical organization of the variability, (3) allow for the first-class representation of simple (i.e., one-to-one) and complex (i.e., n-to-m) dependencies, and (4) allow for modeling the relations between dependencies. Existing variability modeling approaches support the first two requirements, but lack support for the latter two. The contribution of this paper is a framework for variability modeling—COVAMOF—that provides support for all four requirements.
Springer