Validating Partial Configurations of Product Lines

Abstract

Configuring a new variant of a product line is not always a one-time task. In some cases, many stakeholders are involved in the configuration process. This is needed for example, if different stakeholders are responsible for different parts of the product line and they are not allowed to see specific parts of the product line already configured in previous steps. Thus, a partial derivation can be performed, where a part of the configuration process can be done by some stakeholders, while finishing the rest of the configuration process can be achieved by others. Validating partial configurations is a challenging task, since the selection state of some features can still be open. In addition to these open selection states of features, values of attributes, calculations of expressions, as well as constraints are needed to be handled, as they can use information, which is not defined yet. Thus, a validator that ables to address the aforementioned challenges is required. In this paper, we discuss how the partial configurations can be validated considering different cases. While these discussed cases can be applied in general, we focus in this paper on applying them with respect to the industrial variant management tool pure::variants.