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Visualization of Variability in Complex Development Structures

Published: 21 January 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Mass customization in modern industries leads to an increased complexity in product line engineering due to the high level of variability. Real-world industry-sized product lines can easily end up with thousands of features and constraints. Using sophisticated information visualization techniques is one important component in handling this complexity successfully as they provide a higher level of cognitive support and make the comprehension of the underlying structures easier and faster. However, it is still an unresolved problem to handle the occurring variability in a satisfactory way. This means that we need visualization mechanisms able to cope with the requirements of engineers as well as with the needs of the responsible managers. This paper addresses the issue of visualizing large product lines and discusses different techniques which can be used towards an efficient visualization of variability. Furthermore, it presents alternative methods to visualize complex constraints and group cardinalities. These techniques will then be illustrated with the help of a prototypical implementation.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    VaMoS '15: Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems
    January 2015
    127 pages
    ISBN:9781450332736
    DOI:10.1145/2701319
    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: 21 January 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. Complex development structures
    2. Feature diagram
    3. Product line
    4. Variability Management
    5. Visualization

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    VaMoS '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 16 of 34 submissions, 47%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 66 of 147 submissions, 45%

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