An Approach to Variability Management in Service-Oriented Product Lines

Service-Oriented product lines (SOPLs) are dynamic software product lines, in which, the products are developed based on services and service-oriented architecture. Although there are similarities between components and services, there are important differences so that we cannot use component-based product line engineering methods and techniques for SOPL engineering. These differences emerge from the fact that, services can be discovered as black box elements from external repositories. Moreover, services can be dynamically bound and are business-aligned. Therefore, analyzing the conformance of discovered external services with the variability of services in the SOPL -which must be aligned to the variable business needs-is necessary. Variability must be managed, that is, it must be represented (modeled), used (instantiated and capable of conformance checking) and maintained (evolved) over time. Feature Models are insufficient for modeling variability in SOPL, because, services cannot be simply mapped to one or more features, and identification of the mapping depends on knowing the detailed implementation of the services. This research aims at providing an approach to managing the variability in SOPLs so that external services can be involved in the SOPL engineering. This paper presents an overview of the proposal.