A review on variability mechanisms for product lines

Software product line (SPL) is an approach that develops the family of similar software by maximizing the reusability of development artifacts. Together with commonality, variability that differentiates a product from others plays a pivotal role in SPL. During decades lots of variability mechanisms have been developed for software development, and they have been used in SPL as they are. And new mechanisms have been proposed in SPL. This paper gathers a set of data from the existing literatures that describe variability mechanisms, and thereafter try to find out the state of the practices and possible weaknesses in the practices