Identifying and Exploiting the Similarities between Rationale Management and Variability Management

Modeling variability is a challenging issue in product line requirements engineering. Particular problems include, the instantiation of variations for individual products, the long-term evolution of the product line, and the support of collaboration between stakeholders. These problems are even more complicated when the product line organization is globally distributed. To address theses problems, this paper identifies four higher-level similarities between rationale management (which focus on knowledge management during software design) and variability management. Furthermore, exploiting the similarities, rationale management is combined with variability management to contribute issue-based variability modeling. Issue-based variability modeling was implemented and empirically evaluated based on a series of case studies with multi-case design. The results of the evaluation show that our approach improves the instantiation and evolution of variability, enables better informal collaboration between distributed stakeholders with different levels of modeling expertise and enhances the longevity of product lines.