Variability Change Management Using the Orthogonal Variability Model-Based Traceability

Variability is the ability of a software system or artifacts to be changed, customized, or configured for reuse in the product members of a software product line. As the amount of variability increases in software product lines the complexity of managing changes and evolutions of such variability becomes a main concern these days. In this context a high-degree of traceability can support the complexity of variability change management. However, in software product line establishing appropriate traceability is often difficult due to many-to-many relations in different levels of abstraction and across development given two separated and closely related development life cycles called domain and application. This paper proposes an approach tracing variability based on explicit variation points defined in orthogonal variability model and domain artifacts. And we validate the proposed approach through the Calculator product line. As the results of validation we found that our approach supports the defined variability change scenarios well, but has a disadvantage that many derived variation points are additionally defined and managed.