Variability Management in a Software Product Line Unaware Company: Towards a Real Evaluation

Software Product Lines (SPL) enable systematic reuse within an organization thus, enabling the reduction of costs, efforts, development time and the average number of defects per product. However, there is little empirical evidence of SPL adoption in the literature, which makes it difficult to strengthen or elaborate adjustments or improvements to SPL frameworks. In this article, we present the first steps towards an empirical evaluation by showing how companies that do not know about of SPL manage variability in their products, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of their approaches. To this end, we present the design of a case study that we plan to carry out in the future in two companies to evaluate how companies perform variability management when they are not aware of software product lines. Our assumption is that most of the companies manage variability but no many of them are aware of software product lines. In addition, the first preliminary results of the case study applied in a company are presented.