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VML* – A Family of Languages for Variability Management in Software Product Lines

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Software Language Engineering (SLE 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5969))

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Abstract

Managing variability is a challenging issue in software-product-line engineering. A key part of variability management is the ability to express explicitly the relationship between variability models (expressing the variability in the problem space, for example using feature models) and other artefacts of the product line, for example, requirements models and architecture models. Once these relations have been made explicit, they can be used for a number of purposes, most importantly for product derivation, but also for the generation of trace links or for checking the consistency of a product-line architecture. This paper bootstraps techniques from product-line engineering to produce a family of languages for variability management for easing the creation of new members of the family of languages. We show that developing such language families is feasible and demonstrate the flexibility of our language family by applying it to the development of two variability-management languages.

The work reported in this paper was supported by the EC FP7 STREP project AMPLE: Aspect-Oriented Model-Driven Product Line Engineering (www.ample-project.net).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

    Steffen Zschaler & Awais Rashid

  2. Dpto. de Lenguajes y Ciencias de la Computación, Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    Pablo Sánchez & Lidia Fuentes

  3. Computer Science Department, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    João Santos, Mauricio Alférez, Ana Moreira, João Araújo & Uirá Kulesza

Authors
  1. Steffen Zschaler
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  2. Pablo Sánchez
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  3. João Santos
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  4. Mauricio Alférez
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  5. Awais Rashid
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  6. Lidia Fuentes
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  7. Ana Moreira
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  8. João Araújo
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  9. Uirá Kulesza
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, Software Engineering and Technology, Univeristy of Eindhoven, Den Dolech 2, 5612 AZ, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Mark van den Brand

  2. School of Computing and Information Systems, Athabasca University, 1 University Drive, T9S 3A3, Athabasca, AB, Canada

    Dragan Gašević

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama, P.O. Box 870290, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

    Jeff Gray

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Zschaler, S. et al. (2010). VML* – A Family of Languages for Variability Management in Software Product Lines. In: van den Brand, M., Gašević, D., Gray, J. (eds) Software Language Engineering. SLE 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5969. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12107-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12107-4_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12106-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12107-4

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