Development of flexible software process lines with variability operations
Joachim Schramm, Patrick Dohrmann, Marco Kuhrmann · 2015
Context: Software processes evolve over time and several approaches were proposed to support the required flexibility. Yet, little is known whether these approaches sufficiently support the development of large software processes. A software process line helps to systematically develop and manage families of processes and, as part of this, variability operations provide means to modify and reuse pre-defined process assets. Objective: Our goal is to evaluate the feasibility of variability operations to support the development of flexible software process lines. Method: We conducted a longitudinal study in which we studied 5 variants of the V-Modell XT process line for 2 years. Results: Our results show the variability operation instrument feasible in practice. We analyzed 616 operation exemplars addressing various customization scenarios, and we found 87 different operation types contributed by 3 metamodel variants developed by different teams in different contexts. Conclusions: Although variability operations are only one instrument among others, our results suggest this instrument useful to implement variability in real-life software process lines.