Variability Modeling for Distributed Development - A Comparison with Established Practice

摘要

The variability model is a central artifact in product line engineering. Existing approaches typically treat this as a single centralized artifact which describes the configuration of other artifacts. This approach is very problematic in distributed development as a monolithic variability model requires significant coordination among the involved development teams. This holds in particular if multiple independent organizations are involved. At this point very little work exists that explicitly supports variability modeling in a distributed setting. In this paper we address the question how existing, real-world, large-scale projects deal with this problem as a source of inspiration on how to deal with this in variability management.