Language support for managing variability in architectural models

Abstract

The effective management and composition of architectural variabilities has long been of importance to product line architects. Architects need to describe how conceptual variabilities are composed and realised through architectural decompositions of a product line. Architecture variabilities need to be described in terms of the chosen design decompositions, which do not often correspond naturally to feature model decompositions. Also, the fine-grained nature of certain architectural variabilities makes it difficult to represent them in a modular fashion, and describe how they are composed across different views. In order to address these issues, this paper presents a variability modelling language (VML), which supports first-class representation of heterogeneous forms of architectural variabilities. The language complements existing architectural modelling approaches for product lines by providing mechanisms to: (i) explicitly reference variation points in multiple architectural views, and (ii) support compositions involving both fine-grained and coarse-grained variabilities in an orthogonal fashion. The completeness and simplicity of VML is assessed through four case studies from different domains. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.