Managing Variability in Models and Derived Artefacts in Model-driven Software Product Lines

Software product line engineering aims at automatically deriving a family of software products from a common platform. Model-driven software engineering emphasizes using models as primary development artefacts. In many cases, the static structure of a software system can be automatically generated from static models such as class diagrams. However, hand-written source code is still necessary, either for specifying method bodies or for integrating the generated code with already existing artefacts or frameworks. This fact causes problems when developing software product lines in a model-driven way: Variability information needs to be kept consistent over a series of heterogeneous artefacts, including models and generated as well as hand-written source code. In this paper, we present a concept and the corresponding technical solution, which allows for managing variability in models and corresponding derived artefacts. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with the help of a concrete use case in the context of models and hand-written source code fragments.