On the Explicit Consideration of Context Variability in the SPES Modeling Framework.
André Heuer, Tobias Kaufmann, Mihail Constantinescu-Fomino · Software Engineering (Workshops) · 2015
The extended SPES Modeling Framework (SPES MF (ext.)) supports the development of software for embedded systems and recognizes variability in a dedicated perspective. Variability was introduced to the SPES MF to consider different customer needs and to enable the efficient engineering of multiple product variants of software for embedded systems. Hence, an explicit variability model documents the differences of product variants, addressing different customer needs. Following the notion of the SPES MF (ext.), coarse grained engineering problems are decomposed into more fine grained engineering problems. This decomposition requires distinguishing between the current engineering subject and the elements in the context of that engineering subject, which cannot be altered. Based on the experience made in several applications domains (e.g. avionics), we were able to distinguish context variability and non-context variability. As well as elements that are in the context of an engineering subject, context-variability cannot be altered. Because context variability affects the variability of the product variants under development, it needs to be explicitly considered during engineering. Today, context variability is not made explicit in a variability model. Therefore, we propose to recognize context variability in the variability perspective of the SPES MF (ext.) as a separate view. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach by an example taken from the avionics domain. 1