An Approach to Addressing Entity Model Variability within Software Product Lines

Software product line (SPL) engineering is one approach for addressing customization and variability for products. However, current approaches and research, while often addressing feature modeling and component variability, insufficiently address difficulties and additional complexity with respect to entity model variability, which negatively impacts various software qualities, such as correctness, reusability, maintainability, testability, and evolvability. This paper presents a solution approach with an integrated mechanism providing a consistent view to capture data variability in entity models, while hiding and decoupling components from superfluous data elements via adapter generation. An eHealth SPL case study is presented supporting adapter generation with differential entity conversion. The results show that with this approach, entity model variability can be effectively addressed and desirable software qualities preserved.