Relationships in Variability Modeling Approaches: A Survey and Classification

Abstract

International audienceThe Product Line Engineering (PLE) promotes reuse as intent to face new system development constraints like: increasing product quality, time-to-market enhancement, and production costs reduction. The modeling and management of variability and commonalities is central to the PLE and several techniques have been defined to cope with this issue. Modularization and Separation of Concerns (SoC) have been used as an effective solution to tackle the growing complexity of product lines. However, neither consensus about relational information expression, nor categories of relationships, has been defined. In this paper, we propose to consider the existing variability modeling approaches in the literature and provide a survey of the ones concerned with the explicit management of relationships. These approaches are classified by variability techniques and concerns to reveal categories of relationship concerns. A closing discussion highlights some observations on the survey to reveal research perspectives