Model Driven Architecture as Approach to Manage Variability in Software Product Families

In this paper we portrait Model Driven Architecture (MDA) as an approach to derive products in a particular class of software product families, i.e. a configurable product family. The main contribution of this paper is that we relate MDA to a configurable software product family and discuss the mutual benefits of this relation. With respect to variability management, we identify two main benefits of applying MDA to product family engineering, i.e. postponing binding time and mechanism selection to application engineering, and the independent evolution of domain concepts, product family assets and the transformation technique. In addition, we identify variability management as a solution to the problem of round-trip transformation in MDA. Keyword(s): Model Driven Architecture, Software Product Families, Variability Management