Software Product Lines with Design Choices: Reasoning about Variability and Design Uncertainty

Abstract

When designing changes to a software product line (SPL), developers are faced with uncertainty about deciding among multiple possible SPL designs. Since each SPL design encodes a set of related products, dealing with multiple designs means that developers must reason about sets of sets of products. The additional degree of multiplicity is not well described by existing product line abstractions. In this paper, we propose an approach for dealing with design uncertainty within SPLs using a novel composition of variability modelling with an abstraction for capturing and managing design uncertainty. This allows developers to accurately describe the decisions involved in making changes to an SPL during the design stage and provides them with a framework for SPL design space exploration by analyzing and enforcing SPL properties.