Answering the Call of the Wild?: Thoughts on the Elusive Quest for Ecological Validity in Variability Modeling

Ecological validity is a term commonly used in several disciplines to refer to the fact that in a research study, the methods, the materials, and the settings must approximate the real world, i.e. what happens in everyday life. Variability modeling is no exception, it has striven for this form of validity by looking at two main sources, industrial projects and open source projects. Despite their unquestionable value, industrial projects inherently pose limitations; for instance, in terms of open access or results replication, which are two important tenets for any scientific endeavor. In this paper, we present our first findings on the use of open source projects in variability modeling research, and identify trends and avenues for further research.