Research on Augmenting the MDD Process with Variability Modeling

Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPLs) have proven to be successful at reducing the costs and time to market of product development through the planned reuse of software components into products within the same scope. SPL adoption has been typically regarded to follow a proactive approach, although recent surveys show that most of the SPLs are planned following reactive approaches. It seems necessary to refocus SPL engineering research, methodologies and tools for existing systems into SPL. We believe that systems following a Model Driven Development (MDD) approach can highly benefit from these re-engineering efforts, in order to enable them to manage variability. The aim of this research is to analyze how to improve the MDD process with variability modeling in real industrial environments. Nowadays, we have performed three empirical studies related to variability modeling in MDD approaches. These studies are the following: (1) an usability evaluation of a MDD approach with variability modeling, (2) comprehensibility of variability in model fragments for product configuration and (3) an evaluation about bug-fixing in a MDD-SPL tool