Managing Variability in Software Product Lines

A software product line (SPL) is a set of software-intensive systems that share a common set of features for satisfying a particular market segment needs. SPLs can reduce development costs, shorten time-to-market, and improve product quality by reusing core assets for project-specific customizations. To enable reuse on a large scale, SPL engineering (SPLE) identifies and manages commonalities and variations across a set of system artifacts such as requirements, architectures, code components, and test cases.Variability management (VM) is a fundamental SPLE activity that explicitly represents software artifact variations for managing dependencies among variants and supporting their instantiations throughout the SPL life cycle. Managing variability involves extremely complex and challenging tasks, which must be supported by effective methods, techniques, and tools.