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Variability Change Management Using the Orthogonal Variability Model-Based Traceability

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Abstract

Variability is the ability of a software system or artifacts to be changed, customized, or configured for reuse in the product members of a software product line. As the amount of variability increases in software product lines the complexity of managing changes and evolutions of such variability becomes a main concern these days. In this context a high-degree of traceability can support the complexity of variability change management. However, in software product line establishing appropriate traceability is often difficult due to many-to-many relations in different levels of abstraction and across development given two separated and closely related development life cycles called domain and application. This paper proposes an approach tracing variability based on explicit variation points defined in orthogonal variability model and domain artifacts. And we validate the proposed approach through the Calculator product line. As the results of validation we found that our approach supports the defined variability change scenarios well, but has a disadvantage that many derived variation points are additionally defined and managed.

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Notes

  1. The definition of trace artifacts is the same with that of the single software and system traceability. Variability models may be one of trace artifacts, but we define variation points and variants consisting of variability models as distinct trace elements because they have the key roles in our product line traceability approach.

  2. Figure 1 does not show the parts of meta-model for orthogonal variability model. The detailed description of the orthogonally defined variability meta-model refers [3].

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Daejeon University fund (2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Liberal Arts College, Daejeon University, Daejeon, Korea

    Jihyun Lee

  2. Computer Engineering Department, Daejeon University, Daejeon, Korea

    Sunmyung Hwang

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  1. Jihyun Lee
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  2. Sunmyung Hwang
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Correspondence to Sunmyung Hwang.

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Lee, J., Hwang, S. Variability Change Management Using the Orthogonal Variability Model-Based Traceability. Wireless Pers Commun 89, 729–745 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-016-3195-y

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