Mapping Variabilities onto Product Family Assets

The increased amount of variability in software systems meanwhile leads to a situation where the complexity of variability management becomes a primary concern during software development. Whereas sound methodological support to analyze and specify variability on an abstract level is already available, the corresponding support on realization level is still lacking. The goal of this paper is to pave the way towards more systematic and consequently more efficient approaches to manage variability. To this end, it discusses the interrelationships between the specification and realization of variability, identifies appropriate concepts and interrelates them in form of a general model of variability in product families. In addition to this model, the paper briefly presents an application of the model: our small language to specify variability in product family assets.