Capturing Timeline Variability With Transparent Configuration Environments

E. Dolstra, G. Florijn, M. de Jonge and E. Visser. Capturing Timeline Variability with Transparent Configuration Environments. In International Workshop on Software Variability Management, Portland, Oregon, USA, May 2003. (pdf)

Abstract

Virtually every non-trivial software system exhibits variability: the property that the set of features, characteristics of the system that are relevant to some stakeholder, can be changed at certain points in the system's deployment life-cycle. Some features can be bound only at specific moments in the life-cycle, while some can be bound at several distinct moments (timeline variability). This leads to inconsistent configuration interfaces; variability decisions are generally made through different interfaces depending on the moment in the life-cycle. In this paper we propose to formalize variability into a feature model that takes timeline issues into account and to derive from such feature models configuration interfaces that abstract over the life-cycle.