Concepts for Consistent Variant-Management Tool Integrations

Making variability explicit in variable artifacts throughout the product lifecycle is difficult for variant modelers due to the different notations used to express variability. The tool integrations of the variant-management tool pure::variants address this problem, by providing a consistent method for denoting variability in frequentlyused development tools. However, differing technical extension mechanisms of the tools lead to inconsistencies between integrations and slow down the development process. To overcome these problems, we proposed a workflow for implementing new variant-management tool integrations based on real-life requirements and toolindependent use cases. The main idea is that integration developers can derive requirements for their specific integration, based on their knowledge about the supported extension mechanisms of the tool. To ensure continued consistency, the requirements document from which specific documents can be derived is continually updated while implementing new integrations. For evaluation, we tested for three exemplary tools whether it is technically feasible to apply the workflow, and argued based on plausibility and an interview with a pure::variants customer whether our goals are met. Although we identified issues for future work, we concluded that the workflow is technically feasible and fulfills our goals.