Title
Composing Your Compositions of Variability Models.
Abstract
Modeling and managing variability is a key activity in a growing number of software engineering contexts. Support for composing variability models is arising in many engineering scenarios, for instance, when several subsystems or modeling artifacts, each coming with their own variability and possibly developed by different stakeholders, should be combined together. In this paper, we consider the problem of composing feature models (FMs), a widely used formalism for representing and reasoning about a set of variability choices. We show that several composition operators can actually be defined, depending on both matching/merging strategies and semantic properties expected in the composed FM. We present four alternative forms and their implementations. We discuss their relative trade-offs w.r.t. reasoning, customizability, traceability, composability and quality of the resulting feature diagram. We summarize these findings in a reading grid which is validated by revisiting some relevant existing works. Our contribution should assist developers in choosing and implementing the right composition operators.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/978-3-642-41533-3_22
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Field
DocType
Volume
Systems engineering,Computer science,Semantic property,Implementation,Theoretical computer science,Operator (computer programming),Software product line,Composability,Propositional formula,Traceability,Grid
Conference
8107
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
14
0.53
References 
Authors
36
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mathieu Acher174752.36
Benoît Combemale242346.61
Philippe Collet365249.32
Olivier Barais472461.99
Philippe Lahire553827.92
Robert B. France63315271.06