Tool Support for Software Variability Management and Product Derivation in Software Product Lines

Software variability management is a key challenge in developing software product lines and deriving products from the product line. In order to provide effective variability management and product derivation in software product lines, which is capable of being automated, certain fundamental building blocks are required. These include multiple product line views, the feature model as the unifying view, an underlying product line meta-model that provides a schema for a product line repository, support for consistency checking among the multiple views, and support for feature-based product line derivation. This paper describes multiple-view modeling of software product lines, with particular emphasis on the feature modeling view, multiple-view UML meta-modeling for software product lines, variability management in the metamodel, and consistency checking between meta-model views. The paper then describes the requirements for tool support for product lines and product derivation, before describing a software prototype tool for this purpose and evaluating the effectiveness of the tool.