Integration of UVL in FeatureIDE

Abstract

Variability models are prevalent for specifying the commonalities and variabilities of configurable systems. A large variety of tools support using, editing, and analyzing variability models. However, the different tools often depend on distinct textual notations to store and read variability models which induces a large effort for researchers and practitioners. This additional effort could be reduced if the community adopted a single format. Following the goal of the MODEVAR initiative to develop a widely adopted variability language, we provided a first proposal with the Universal Variability language (UVL) in previous work. For a textual format to be adopted, an important aspect is an as small as possible effort when integrating the format in other tools. In this work, we discuss the integration of UVL in FeatureIDE. We use the integration to examine the applicability of UVL and our parser library to existing tools and gather further requirements for the language design. Furthermore, we provide a thorough documentation on the implementation to be used as reference and guidance for integration in other tools.