Variability implementation and UML-based software product lines

Variability makes it possible to easily change and adapt software systems for specific contexts in a preplanned manner. It has been considered in several research topics, including self-adaptive systems, large-scale enterprise systems, and system-of-systems, and was mainly consolidated by the Software Product Line (SPL) engineering. SPL manages a common platform for developing a family of products with reduced time to market, better quality, and lower cost. Variability in the SPL must be clearly identified, modeled, evaluated, and instantiated. Despite the advances in this field, managing the variability of systems is still challenging for building software-intensive product families. One difficulty is that the software architecture, the cornerstone of any design process, is usually defined with notations and languages lacking accurate forms to describe the variability concerns of software systems. Hence, in this chapter, we analyze approaches used for describing software variability in SPL, paying special attention to the architecture.