Workshop on Software Variability and Product Lines

University of Groningen, May 9^th 2008
Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen. Get directions to reach the building.
The workshop will take place at the grote vergaderzaal (room 0079) - Academic complex (1121). The defences will take place in the Aula.

Programme

09:30-09:45 Opening (Paris Avgeriou and Jan Bosch)
09:45-11:00 Session 1
                "Software Variability Management” by Kyo Kang (POSTECH, Korea)
                       Discussion
11:00-11:15 break
11:15-12:30 Session 2
                  “Meta-Variability and Software Production Environments” by Klaus Schmid (University of Hildesheim, Germany)
                  Discussion
12:30-13:00 Lunch break
13:00-14:00 Session 3 - Trends and developments - social, mobile, global
                  Plenary discussion
14:00          Closing

Abstract of "Software Variability Management” by Kyo Kang. Product line software engineering (PLSE) has been recognized as a key software development paradigm for meeting diverse needs of the global market efficiently and effectively giving competitive advantages to IT industries and embedded systems developers. The Product Line Engineering Program of SEI (www.sei.cmu.edu) and a series of Esprit and ITEA projects of EU sparked researches and technology transfer efforts in this area since early 90s. The PLSE paradigm has been changing the way software developers think about software development: from the single application view to the application family, i.e., product line, view. Several software engineering concepts and techniques have been developed to support the product line engineering, including commonality and variability analysis, variation points and variants, variability management, and generative programming. As the PLSE paradigm has been applied to large scale domains such as automobile and mobile communications, the ability to manage variability effectively has been recognized as a key success factor. In my talk, I will give an overview the evolution of reuse concepts, discuss various dimensions of variability management, give a brief introduction of the method that I have been working on, and discuss research issues.

Abstract of "Meta-Variability and Software Production Environments” by Klaus Schmid. Variability is a core concept of product line engineering; managing variability one of its central challenges. As product lines become increasingly complex, the need to address this complexity with adequate tool support becomes paramount. A new concept in this area is meta-variability, i.e., the variability of attributes of the variability model like binding time. In this presentation we will discuss the concept of meta-variability and will show its relationships to variations in the production process of instances of the product line.Sufficiently powerful product derivation environments are capable of supporting meta-variability. We will demonstrate one such environment and discuss how its capabilities can be used to dynamically weave different implementation techniques into the final system.