Abstract
Effective product family based development depends on exploiting the commonality and variability in customer requirements. The desirability of variability in products is driven by the (manifest and hidden) needs of the various target market segments identified by various organizational units like sales and marketing. These are informed by other critical components of the context in which product families are developed including the technological capabilities, people/human resources available with the organization, the policies and procedures of the organization, and the strategic objective of the organization. Variability Management is seen as the key aspect that differentiates conventional software engineering and software product line engineering [Kruger 02]. Variability in a product family is defined as a measure of how members of a family may differ from each other [WeissLai 99]. Variability is made explicit using variation points. Variation points are places in design artifacts where a specific decision has been narrowed to several options but the option to be chosen for a particular system has been left open [Atkinson 01]. Identification of the points of variability is crucial in proliferating variety from a single product platform. A central component of product family approach is the management of variability. The product family development process involves managing variations among different members of the family by identifying common and variable aspects in the domain under consideration.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
IEEE Product No.: SH94869-TBR: Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems. IEEE Standard No. 1471-2000
Reusable Asset Specification, Rational website, http://www.rational.com/rda/consortium.jsp
Becker, M.: Towards a General Model of Variability in Product Families. In: Proceedings of the Software Variability Management Workshop, University of Groningen, Groningen (2003)
Jaring, M., Bosch, J.: Representing Variability in Software Product Lines: A Case Study. In: Chastek, G.J. (ed.) SPLC 2002. LNCS, vol. 2379, pp. 15–36. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Kang, K.C., et al.: FORM: A feature-oriented reuse method with domain-specific reference architectures. Annals of Software Engineering 5(1-4), 26 (1998)
Jacobson, I., Griss, M., Jonsson, P.: Software Reuse-Architecture, Process and Organization for Business Success. ACM Press, New York (1997)
Modeling and Using Product Line Variability in Automotive Systems, Steffen Thiel and Andreas Hein, IEEE Software, p. 66ff (July/August 2002)
Thiel, S., Hein, A.: Systematic Integration of Variability into Product Line Architecture Design. In: Chastek, G.J. (ed.) SPLC 2002. LNCS, vol. 2379, pp. 130–153. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
van Gurp, J., Bosch, J., Svahnberg, M.: On the Notion of Variability in Software Product Lines. In: Proceedings of the Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA 2001) (2001)
Webber, D.L., Gomaa, H.: Modeling Variability with the Variability model. In: Gacek, C. (ed.) ICSR 2002. LNCS, vol. 2319, p. 109. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Krueger, C.W.: Variation Management for Software Product Lines. In: Chastek, G.J. (ed.) SPLC 2002. LNCS, vol. 2379, p. 37. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Weiss, D.M., Lai, C.T.R.: Software Product-Line Engineering: A Family-based Software Development Process. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1999)
Atkinson, C., Bayer, J., Bunse, C., Kamsties, E., Laitenberger, O., Laqua, R., Muthig, D., Paech, B., Wust, J., Zettel, J.: Component-Based Product Line Engineering with UML. Addison-Wesley Pub Co., Reading (2001)
Clauss, M.: Generic Modeling using UML Extensions for Variability. In: Workshop on Domain Specific Visual Languages: An OOPSLA 2001 Workshop, Tampa Bay, Florida (2001)
Svahnberg, M., Bosch, J.: Issues Concerning Variability in Software Product Lines. In: van der Linden, F.J. (ed.) IW-SAPF 2000. LNCS, vol. 1951, p. 146. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Lee, K., Kang, K.C., Lee, J.: Concepts and Guidelines of Feature Modeling for Product Line Software Engineering. In: Chastek, G.J. (ed.) SPLC 2002. LNCS, vol. 2379, Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bachmann, F. et al. (2004). A Meta-model for Representing Variability in Product Family Development. In: van der Linden, F.J. (eds) Software Product-Family Engineering. PFE 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3014. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24667-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24667-1_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-21941-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-24667-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive