Commonality and Variability in Software Engineering

3 7 ncreasingly, software engineers spend their time creating software families consisting of similar systems with many variations. While developers are pressed to build these families, they have no effective means for doing so. They are asked to create and reuse libraries of components but find those libraries costly to build and of limited value. They search for the right decomposition of their software into modules or classes, but have limited guidance in finding those decompositions, especially in the face of constraints on performance , reliability, and ease of use. Scope, commonality, and variability (SCV) analysis gives software engineers a systematic way of thinking about and identifying the product family they are creating. Among other things, it helps developers ♦ create a design that contributes to reuse and ease of change, ♦ predict how a design might fail or succeed as it evolves, and ♦ identify opportunities for automating the creation of family members. I Soft ware engineers are under tremendous pressure to develop new system versions in less time. The authors show the benefits of explicitly identifying the common and variable aspects of the different versions of a system.