Integrated management of variability in space and time in software families

Abstract

Software product lines (SPLs) and software ecosystems (SECOs) encompass a family of closely related software systems in terms of common and variable assets that are configured to concrete products (variability in space). Over the course of time, variable assets of SPLs and especially SECOs are subject to change in order to meet new requirements as part of software evolution (variability in time). Even though both dimensions of variability have to be handled simultaneously, e.g., as not all customers upgrade their respective products immediately or completely, there currently is no approach that can create variants with a selection of variable assets in various versions. In this paper, we introduce an integrated approach to manage variability in space and time in software families using Hyper Feature Models (HFMs) with feature versions and combine them with an extension of the transformational variability realization mechanism delta modeling. This allows derivation of concrete software systems from an SPL or SECO configuring both functionality (features) as well as versions.