Using Aspects to Model Product Line Variability

The often crosscutting characteristics of feature implementations make effective variability management a predominant engineering challenge in software product line engineering. Features can often hardly be modularized but are spread over several other modules. In this paper we propose XWeave, an approach that facilitates variability implementation, management, and tracing by using aspects to model product line variability. In our approach we use models to describe product lines. Aspect-oriented techniques are used to help implementing the variants in the models. We argue that due to the fact that models are more abstract and hence less detailed than code, variability on model level is inherently less scattered and therefore simpler to manage than traditional variability management on code level.