Exploring the 3-dimensional variability of websites' user-stories using triadic concept analysis

Configurable software systems and families of similar software systems are increasingly being considered by industry to provide software tailored to each customer's needs. Their development requires managing software variability, i.e. commonalities, differences and constraints. A primary step is properly analyzing the variability of software, which can be done at various levels, from specification to deployment. In this paper, we focus on the software variability expressed through user-stories, viz. short formatted sentences indicating which user role can perform which action at the specification level. At this level, variability is usually analyzed in a two dimension view, i.e. software described by features, and considering the roles apart. The novelty of this work is to model the three dimensions of the variability (i.e. software, roles, features) and explore it using Triadic Concept Analysis (TCA), an extension of Formal Concept Analysis. The variability exploration is based on the extraction of 3-dimensional implication rules. The adopted methodology is applied to a case study made of 65 commercial web sites in four domains, i.e. manga, martial arts sports equipment, board games including trading cards, and video-games. This work highlights the diversity of information provided by such methodology to draw directions for the development of a new product or for building software variability models.