Analyzing Methodologies and Tools for Specifying Variability in Software Processes

Software process lines (SPrL) are families of highly related processes that are built from a set of core process assets in a prestablished fashion. Software companies may take advantage of SPrL in order to deal with different kinds of projects –development or maintenance, large or small, complex or simple– just defining a general process and modeling variability so that the general process can be adapted accordingly in each case. Formally specifying variability enables automatic tailoring. However, and provided that SPrL is quite a recent research area, there is no established methodology or notation for modeling process variability. In this paper we present the kinds of variability we have found to be relevant for processes, and we investigate the appropriateness of different approaches for modeling process variability such as SPEM 2.0 primitives and vSPEM, and other general notations for modeling variability such as OVM and feature models. We make an analysis based on the expresiveness of each notation for dealing with the required variability, as well as the understandability of the specification, adherence to standard formats and the tool support availability. We illustrate each option specifying the variability of the process of a medium size Chilean software company.