XVCL: a mechanism for handling variants in software product lines

Software reuse focused on product lines has emerged as one of the promising ways to increase software productivity and quality. XVCL (XML-based Variant Configuration Language) is a variability mechanism we developed for handling variants in software product lines. We apply XVCL to develop product line assets (including domain model, product line architecture and generic components) as a set of x-frames that are capable of accommodating both commonality and variability in a domain. Specific systems, members of a product line, can be constructed by adapting and composing x-frames. In this paper, we illustrate our approach using examples from our product line project on Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) domain.