A Methodological Approach to Domain Engineering for Software Variability Enhancement

Flexibility is one of the major quality aspects that are required for today’s applications. Variability realization techniques provide a mean to achieve this flexibility. Some variability realization techniques that provide higher levels of flexibility also imply more complex engineering processes. This is the case of more recent techniques like reflection and run-time code generation. This paper addresses the problem of the increasing of complexity in the engineering process caused by the adoption of very flexible variability realization techniques. We present an approach that is based on the adoption of domain engineering methods within the context of single application development. These methods, when applied in parallel with the application engineering methods, can provide support to manage the complexity of variability realization techniques.