ECOOP / Tutorial 15

Software Variability Management

Topic	Software variability management, software product families, configurable product bases
Goal	To discuss the emerging challenge of variability management, provide a conceptual framework, discuss various approaches to handling variability.
Style	Presentation and discussion

Abstract

In a variety of approaches to software development, software artifacts are used in multiple contexts or for various purposes. The differences lead to so-called variation points in the software artifact. During recent years, the amount of variability supported by a software artifact is growing considerably and its management is developing as a main challenge in the development, usage and evolution of software artifacts. Examples of approaches where the management of variability is evolving as a challenge include software product families, component-based software development, object-oriented frameworks and configurable software products such as enterprise resource planning systems.
The tutorial presents insights gained, techniques developed and lessons learned in the European IST project ConIPF (Configuration in Industrial Product Families) and in other research performed by the software engineering research group at the University of Groningen. The tutorial first establishes the importance of software variability management, defines the concept of variability, discusses notational and visualization aspects, assessment of software artifacts for variability, design of architectures and components for variability, usage of variation points while configuring instantiated software artefacts and, finally, some advanced issues including variation versus composition.

Presenter Profile

Jan Bosch

Prof. dr. ir. Jan Bosch is a professor of software engineering at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where he heads the software engineering research group. He received a MSc degree from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and a PhD degree from Lund University, Sweden. His research activities include software architecture design, software product lines, object-oriented frameworks and component-oriented programming. He is the author of a book "Design and Use of Software Architectures: Adopting and Evolving a Product Line Approach" published by Pearson Education (Addison-Wesley & ACM Press), (co-)editor of three volumes in the Springer LNCS series and has (co-)authored more than 50 refereed journal and conference publications. He has organized numerous workshops, served on many programme committees, including the ICSR'6, CSMR'2000, ECBS'2000, GCSE, SPLC and TOOLS conferences and is member of the steering group of the WICSA conference. He was the PC co-chair of the 3rd IFIP (IEEE) Working Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA-3) and is the general chair for WICSA-4.

Details

Presenter(s)	Jan Bosch (University of Groningen)
Date Duration	Monday, 21 half day
Level	intermediate
Targeted Audience	The expected audience can be divided into two categories. First, software engineers and technical managers interested in understanding the consequences of increased variability requirements and adopting an explicit approach software variability management. Second, researchers interested in the experiences collected by the tutorial presenter and his research group and the reflections made based on the experiences.