Product-lining the elinvar wealthtech microservice platform

Abstract

Software product lining is the act of providing different but related software products under the same brand, known as a software product line (SPL). As engineering, management and validation of SPLs is far from trivial, special solutions for software product line engineering (SPLE) have a continuous momentum in both academic and industry. In general, it is hard to judge when to reasonably favor SPLE over alternative solutions that are more common in the industry. In this paper, we illustrate how we as Elinvar manage variability within our WealthTech Platform as a Service (PaaS) at different granularity levels, and discuss methods for SPLE in this context. More in detail, we share our techniques and concepts to address configuration management, and show how we manage a single microservice SPL including inter-service communication. Finally, we provide insights into platform solutions by means of packages for our clients. We end with a discussion on SPLE techniques in context of service SPLs and our packaging strategy. We conclude that while we are good to go with industry-standard approaches for microservice SPLs, the variability modeling and analysis advantages within SPLE is promising for our packaging strategy.