A customizable approach to full lifecycle variability management

In order to enable a smooth transition to product line development for an organization that so far only performed single system development, it is necessary to keep as many of the existing notations and approaches in place as possible. This requires adaptability of the basic variability management approach to the specific situation at hand. In this paper we describe an approach that enables homogenous variability management across the different lifecycle stages, independent of the specific notation. The approach is accompanied by a meta-model and a process for introducing the variability management approach by developing a notation-independent representation. This approach has so far been applied in several cases where our Product Line engineering method PuLSE™ has been introduced into a software development organization.