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A systematic analysis of textual variability modeling languages

Published: 26 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Industrial variability models tend to grow in size and complexity due to ever-increasing functionality and complexity of software systems. Some authors report on variability models specifying several thousands of variabilities. However, traditional variability modeling approaches do not seem to scale adequately to cope with size and complexity of such models. Recently, textual variability modeling languages have been advocated as one scalable solution.
In this paper, we provide a systematic analysis of the capabilities of current textual variability modeling languages, in particular regarding variability management in the large. Towards this aim, we define a classification schema consisting of five dimensions, classify ten different textual variability modeling languages using the classification schema and provide an analysis. In summary, some textual variability modeling languages go beyond textual representations of traditional variability modeling approaches and provide sophisticated modeling concepts and constraint languages. Three textual variability modeling approaches already support mechanisms for large-scale variability modeling such as model composition, modularization, or evolution support.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SPLC '13: Proceedings of the 17th International Software Product Line Conference
August 2013
286 pages
ISBN:9781450319683
DOI:10.1145/2491627
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 26 August 2013

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Author Tags

  1. scalability
  2. software product lines
  3. textual variability modeling
  4. variability management
  5. variability modeling in the large

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SPLC 2013
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Overall Acceptance Rate 167 of 463 submissions, 36%

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  • (2022)Improving Variabilty Analysis through Scenario-Based Incompatibility DetectionInformation10.3390/info1303014913:3(149)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2022
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