Variability Extraction and Modeling for Product Variants (Journal-First Abstract)

Fast changing hardware and software technologies in addition to larger and more specialized customer bases demand software tailored to meet very diverse requirements. Software development approaches that aim at capturing this diversity on a single consolidated platform (i.e. software product lines [5]) often require large upfront investments of time and money. Alternatively, companies resort to developing one variant of a software product at a time by reusing as much as possible from already existing product variants (i.e. clone-and-own [2]). However, identifying and extracting the parts to reuse is an error-prone and inefficient task. Hence, more disciplined and systematic approaches are needed to cope with the complexity of developing and maintaining sets of product variants. Such approaches require detailed information about the product variants, the features they provide and their relations.