Towards a Conceptual Model for Unifying Variability in Space and Time

Effectively managing variability in space and time is among the main challenges of developing and maintaining large-scale yet long-living software-intensive systems. Over the last decades, two large research fields, Software Configuration Management (SCM) and Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE), have focused on version management and the systematic handling of variability, respectively. However, neither research community has been successful in producing unified management techniques that are effective in practice, and both communities have developed largely independently of each other. As a step towards overcoming this unfortunate situation, in this paper, we report on ongoing work on conceiving a conceptual yet integrated model of SCM and SPLE concepts, originating from a recent Dagstuhl seminar on the unification of version and variant management. Our goal is to provide discussion grounds for a wider exploration of a unified methodology supporting software evolution in both space and time.