Results

Open Issues and Further Things To Do

Pictures

• Topic overview
  

• Imperfect Frameworks for the Real World
  

• Pointcut Language for Procedural Languages
  

• Testing
  

• QoS^?
  

-- JohnAnvik - 23 Nov 2004

Type and Mechanism of Variation

solution vs. problem space

types of variation in problem space:

offerted by feature models: optional mandatory alternatives set selection

other dimension features that go into code into process into

in general: everything that can be decided on

features lack semantics

types of variation in the solution space = Operations: substitutive variation (replace) additive variation remove

other dimension: functionality and non functional things

mechanisms for variation in solution space: ifdef aspects templates ...

We want to have: Patterns for doing variations

If you have this kind of variation with this kind of feature and are restricted to this set of mechanisms implement it like this.

Semantic Interfaces

exposing variation points

On Demand Variation

runtime variation on demand requirments changed during runtime (for high availability systems) change the code during runtime, not only configurate it

ways to do this: AO : offers runtime weaving/hot deployment flexible component systems: replace, add, remove components patching at runtim ...

what is missing?

same problem as evolution

Crosscutting Feature Models

mapping several feature models on each other? crosscutting feature over one feature model?

Valid Variations in Problem/Solution space

-- DaniloBeuche - 10 Nov 2004

* Alves_Matos_Borba.zip^?;

* Arvind_Turkaye_Yilmaz_Schmidt_Gokhale_Memon_Porter.zip^?;

* Bader_Armouti_Ren_Elrad.zip^?;

* Bray_Yuen_Coady_Fiuczynski.zip^?;

* Groher.zip^?;

* Klint_Storm.zip^?;

* Loughran_Rashid.zip^?;

* Wuchner.zip^?;

-- ChristaSchwanninger - 11 Nov 2004

PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS

MVCDC 2: Second Workshop on Managing Variabilities consistently in Design and Code - OOPSLA 2005

ABSTRACT

With the introduction of software product line approaches into the practice, variants and variability add a new dimension of complexity to the software development process. The combinatorial explosion of possible variants in systems with a high degree of variability requires improved and changed concepts for specifying, modeling, and implementing these systems to assure quality and functionality.

Current OO technologies and standardized design languages fall short in offering appropriate support for designing and implementing variabilities. Additionally the integration of design tools and implementation technologies concerning variants is still poor.

The main goal is to discuss and identify efficient ways for dealing with highly variable software systems on design and code level by evaluating existing approaches and new ideas from the research community and industrial practice.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• tools and processes for managing variants
• modeling languages for capturing variants
• code generation support
• feature oriented development tools and technologies
• languages for independent feature development and feature composition
• AO approaches for independent feature development and feature composition
• Integration of variant management into model driven software development techniques
• Support for model to model and model to code transformations

IMPORTANT DATES

• Position Papers Due: Friday, August 26, 2005
• Notification of Acceptance: Friday, September 9, 2005
• Workshop: Thursday, October 20, 2005

WORKSHOP ACTIVITIES

The workshop is laid out as full day workshop. Instead of presenting the papers, each participant will be expected to review everyone else's paper before the workshop and complete the following two sentences for each:

• What I really liked about this paper is ...
• The most important question I would like to ask the author is ...

These answers are written down on index cards and will be collected before the workshop. During the workshop, we will spend the morning with questions and answers to gain deeper insight into the problem described in the paper. Before each paper session, the author will be permitted a 4 minute slot to very briefly present his paper/work. The workshop format in the afternoon will be utilizing the "Open Space" format in order to discuss topics of interest that might be, or might not be directly related to the papers presented in the morning.

PARTICIPATION

Every interested person is invited to apply for attendance by sending a position paper to the organizers. The submission should be one to two pages describing the key ideas. Submissions will be reviewed by the organizers. The authors will be notified about acceptance before the early registration deadline.

WORKSHOP COMITTEE

• Christa Schwanninger, Siemens AG
• Danilo Beuche, pure systems
• Krzysztof Czarnecki, University of Waterloo
• Mira Mezini, Darmstadt University of Technology
• Markus Völter, Independent Consultant
• Rainer Burgstaller, Siemens AG

MORE INFORMATION AT

http://www.kircher-schwanninger.de/workshops/MVCDC/

Software product families and populations make a convincing case for the increasing importance of software variability management. Although the notion of software product families dates back to the 1970’s, broad industrial adoption started at the end of the 1990s. Early industrial adopters, such as Philips, started their work on software product families in 1994.

The reason for identifying software variability management as a core topic is twofold. First, within the software engineering research community, we have come to realize that the fundamental issue in a range of reuse approaches, including object-oriented frameworks, component-based software engineering and software product families, is the management of the provided variability in the context of the commonality. Basically, the reusability of any software artefact is determined by its ability to support the variability required from it. Second, in several industrial organizations, the complexity of variability management is becoming such that more systematic approaches are required as the limitations of ad-hoc approaches experienced daily. For instance, the number of variation points for industrial software product families may range in the thousands.

Stolen from CfP of the 2nd Groningen Workshop on Software Variability Management

-- DaniloBeuche - 10 Nov 2004

See also

• WebChanges100
• WebChanges200
• WebChanges500

• Upcoming Events
  • 9th International Software Product Line Conference (sucessor of former PFE workshops)
    September 26-29, 2005, Rennes, France
  • 2nd Workshop Managing Variability Consistently In Design and Code
    OOSPLA 2005, October 20, 2004, San Diego, CA

• Recent Events
  • 2nd Groningen Workshop on Software Variability Management
    December 2-3, 2004, Groningen, Netherlands. There links to most presentations on this page.
  • Workshop Managing Variability Consistently In Design and Code
    OOSPLA 2004, October 24, 2004, Vancouver
  • ICSE 2003 Workshop: Software Variability Management
    ECCOP 2003, May 2003
  • 1st Groningen Workshop on Software Variability Management (broken link)
    February, 2003, Groningen, Netherlands

• WebChanges: Find out recent modifications to the TWiki.Variability web.
• WebIndex: Display all TWiki.Variability topics in alphabetical order.
• WebNotify: Subscribe to be automatically notified when something changes in the TWiki.Variability web.
• WebStatistics: View access statistics of the TWiki.Variability web.
• WebPreferences: Preferences of the TWiki.Variability web.

2004-11-10

Creation of Variability web.

• EelcoVisser - visser@cs.uu.nl

Note: It is helpful to insert your name in alphabetical order (by first name -- ignore the "Main.") -- then you can find your name (or not) more easily if you wish to remove it or confirm that you are on the list.

Related topics: TWikiUsers, TWikiRegistration

TWiki.Variability Web Preferences

The following settings are web preferences of the TWiki.Variability web. These preferences overwrite the site-level preferences in TWikiPreferences, and can be overwritten by user preferences (your personal topic, i.e. TWikiGuest in the TWiki.Main web)

Preferences:

• Set WEBTITLE = Software Variability Management

• List of topics of the TWiki.Variability web:
  • Set WEBTOPICLIST = Home | Changes | Index | Search | Go

• Web specific background color: (Pick a lighter one of the StandardColors)
  • Set WEBBGCOLOR = #FFFF99

• Exclude web from a web="all" search: (Set to on for hidden webs)
  • Set NOSEARCHALL =

• Default template for new topics and form(s) for this web:
  • WebTopicEditTemplate^?: Default template for new topics in this web. (Site-level is used if topic does not exist)
  • TWiki.WebTopicEditTemplate: Site-level default template
  • TWikiForms: How to enable form(s)
  • Set WEBFORMS =

• Users or groups who are not / are allowed to view / change / rename topics in the Variability web: (See TWikiAccessControl)
  • Set DENYWEBVIEW =
  • Set ALLOWWEBVIEW =
  • Set DENYWEBCHANGE = TWikiGuest
  • Set ALLOWWEBCHANGE =
  • Set DENYWEBRENAME = TWikiGuest
  • Set ALLOWWEBRENAME =

• Users or groups allowed to change or rename this WebPreferences topic: (I.e. TWikiAdminGroup)
  • Set ALLOWTOPICCHANGE =
  • Set ALLOWTOPICRENAME =

• Web preferences that are not allowed to be overridden by user preferences:
  • Set FINALPREFERENCES = WEBTOPICLIST, DENYWEBVIEW, ALLOWWEBVIEW, DENYWEBCHANGE, ALLOWWEBCHANGE, DENYWEBRENAME, ALLOWWEBRENAME

Notes:

• A preference is defined as:
  6 spaces * Set NAME = value
  Example:
  • Set WEBBGCOLOR = #FFFFC0
• Preferences are used as TWikiVariables by enclosing the name in percent signs. Example:
  • When you write variable %WEBBGCOLOR% , it gets expanded to #FFFF99 .
• The sequential order of the preference settings is significant. Define preferences that use other preferences first, i.e. set WEBCOPYRIGHT before WIKIWEBMASTER since %WEBCOPYRIGHT% uses the %WIKIWEBMASTER% variable.
• You can introduce new preferences variables and use them in your topics and templates. There is no need to change the TWiki engine (Perl scripts).

Related Topics:

• TWikiPreferences has site-level preferences.
• TWikiUsers has a list of user topics. User topics can have optional user preferences.
• TWikiVariables has a list of common %VARIABLES%.
• TWikiAccessControl explains how to restrict access by users or groups.

• Topic index: List of Variability topics in alphabetical order.
  |All|A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M|N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z|
  | All topics in BookView |

• Jump to topic: If you already know the name of the topic, enter the name of the topic into the GoBox at the top

• WebChanges: Find out what topics in Variability have changed recently

• How to edit text:
  • Make changes to topics in GoodStyle,
  • Learn the TextFormattingRules, and
  • Have a look at the TextFormattingFAQ

Statistics for TWiki.Variability Web

Notes:

• Do not edit this topic, it is updated automatically. (You can also force an update)
• TWikiDocumentation tells you how to enable the automatic updates of the statistics.
• Suggestion: You could archive this topic once a year and delete the previous year's statistics from the table.

• RoadMap^?
• WebIndex: all topics in the Variability web
• WebSearch: find topics

Tracking activity

• WebNews: selected changes
• WebChanges: recent changes
• WebNotify: email notification of changes
• WebStatistics: usage counts

Look and feel

• WebPreferences: values of variables
• WebContents^?: web specific entries in the side bar

The Call for Papers contains links to the submitted position papers and information about the workshop organisers etc.

The workshop participants agreed to document (some of) the workshop results using this wiki.

After a discussion of the Position Papers several topics were selected and grouped together. For each topic group a seperate group discussed the questions in detail and presented the results in a plenary session afterwards.

Discussion Topics

1. Feature Mining^?
   1. bottom up identification of variability
   2. feature mining
   3. notions of "feature"

1. Evolution
   1. Refactoring; impact on previous variants
   2. traceability of variation points
   3. consistent mapping between model and implementation -> #number of steps/levels
   4. Core changing -> smaller, ->not at all -> bigger
   5. mechanisms for managing intra lifecycle vaiability

1. Adoption
   1. adoption criteria ->new projects, ->legacy projects
   2. pointcut language for procedural languages
   3. imperfect/partial/incomplete "framework" for managing varibailiy in the real world
   4. modeling/ensuring QoS^? for different variants
   5. testing of product lines

1. Mapping of Domain Space to Solution Space
   1. type and mechanism of variation
   2. semantic interfaces
   3. on demand variation
   4. crosscutting feature models
   5. valid variations in problem/solution space