Evaluating variability instantiation strategies for product lines
Pages 105 - 113
Abstract
Explicit variability management is essential for large product lines and requires explicit strategies for instantiating the managed variabilities during application engineering. An instantiation strategy proposes a certain order for the resolution of variabilities during application engineering or for testing. If an alphabetical strategy is used, for instance, the variabilities are resolved in alphabetical order, from A to Z. In this paper, we motivate the necessity of strategies for large variability models, which help to identify starting points and guide the resolution of variability models.
We sketch the application of the strategies in a tool and give the results of an experiment performed to compare the strategies in different situations. The experiment showed that the efficiency of instantiation differs by more than 35% between different strategies. Additionally, the meaningfulness of the instantiation was perceived differently for the various strategies and the strategies were all perceived as being easy to resolve. With the experiment, we managed to demonstrate that the effectiveness of instantiation strategies differs, which motivates the need for different variability instantiation strategies in different situations.
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Index Terms
- Evaluating variability instantiation strategies for product lines
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Published In
January 2011
174 pages
ISBN:9781450305709
DOI:10.1145/1944892
- General Chair:
- Patrick Heymans,
- Program Chairs:
- Krzysztof Czarnecki,
- Ulrich W. Eisenecker
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Association for Computing Machinery
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Published: 27 January 2011
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VaMoS '11
VaMoS '11: 2011 Variability Modeling of Software-intensive Systems
January 27 - 29, 2011
Namur, Belgium
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