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Commonality and Variability Management

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Written by Brad Appleton   
Sunday, 23 March 2008 16:21

Continuing the previous discussion on software product-lines ...

Central to the notion of product-lines and product-families are tracking and managing three different kinds of software assets:
  • common/core assets that are shared by all the products in the product-line
  • shared assets that are common to some products but not others, and ...
  • product-specific assets (or custom-components) that are specific to a single product in the product-line.
Architecture for such product-lines is all about managing commonality and variability, and easing their evolution to achieve a diverse family of products to achieve economies of scale from reusing common assets. Change/Configuration Management for SPLs is a very challenging problem. And variability management techniques often come down to a matter of binding-times. There are also more advanced strategies (some involving mathematical models).

A few resources on the subject of Commonality and Variability are as follows:
In July 2006 I presented at the Dr Dobbs' Architecture & Design World conference about SCM Patterns for Agile Architectures, which included a section on managing variations. I summarized that portion of the presentation as follows:
    Use Late-Binding instead of Branching:
    • Build/Package Options
    • Feature Configuration/Selection
    • Business Rules

    Think about which of the following needs to "vary" and what needs to stay the same:
    • Interface vs. Implementation vs. Integration
    • Container vs. Content vs. Context

    Commonality & Variability analysis helps identify the core dimensions of variation for your project

    Use a combination of strategies based on the different types of needed variation and the "dimension" in which each one operates

Commonality and Variability Management

Posted: 2008-03-24 00:21:00

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Author:Brad Appleton

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