Categorizing and modeling variation in families of systems: a position paper

  • Authors:

  • Borislava I. Simidchieva;Leon J. Osterweil

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Software Architecture: Companion Volume
  • Year:
  • 2010

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper presents an approach that considers variation in systems and system architectures according to the kind of relation among the variants in the software family. The approach highlights why it is beneficial to consider such different variation relations separately and gives examples of what these relations may be. Two main categories of variation relations are presented, based on whether the system architecture remains constant (architecture-based variation), or whether the architecture itself is variable, i.e. the variants do not share a common architecture. The paper introduces several different kinds of variation families that seem to belong to these two categories, as well as yet other families comprising variants that do not neatly fit in either category, with only a subset of the variants sharing a common architecture. Each kind of variation relation is illustrated with an example software family from different domains, including operating systems (OS).