A unified tabular method for modeling variants of software product line

Abstract

Reuse of software is a promising approach to improving the efficiency of software development regarding time, cost and quality. Reuse requires a systematic approach. The best results are achieved if we focus on systems in a specific domain, so-called product line. The key difference between the conventional software engineering and software product line engineering is variant management. The main idea of software product line is to identify the common core functionality which can be implemented once and reused afterwards for all members of the product line. To facilitate this reuse opportunity the domain engineering phase makes the domain model comprising the common as well as variant requirements. In principle, common requirements among systems in a family are easy to handle. However, problem arises during handling variants. Different variants have dependencies on each other; a single variant can affect several variants of the domain model. These problems become complex when the volume of information grows in a domain and there are a lot of variants with several interdependencies. Hence, a separate model is required for handling the variants. This paper presents a mechanism, which we call, Unified Tabular Method to facilitate the management of variant dependencies in product lines. The tabular method consists of a variant part to model the variants and their dependencies, and a decision table to depict the customization decision regarding each variant while deriving customized products. Tabular method alleviates the problem of possible explosion of variant combinations and facilitates the tracing of variant information in the domain model