Three Cases of Feature-Based Variability Modeling in Industry

Large software product lines need to manage complex variability. A common approach is variability modeling—creating and maintaining models that abstract over the variabilities inherent in such systems. While many variability modeling techniques and notations have been proposed, little is known about industrial practices and how industry values or criticizes this class of modeling. We attempt to address this gap with an exploratory case study of three companies that apply variability modeling. Among others, our study shows that variability models are valued for their capability to organize knowledge and to achieve an overview understanding of codebases. We observe centralized model governance, pragmatic versioning, and surprisingly little constraint modeling, indicating that the effort of declaring and maintaining constraints does not always pay off.