Extending the Common Variability Language (CVL) Engine
José-Miguel Horcas, Mónica Pinto, Lidia Fuentes · 2017
The Common Variability Language (CVL) has become a reference in the specification and resolution of variability in the last few years. Despite the multiple advantages of CVL (orthogonal variability, architecture variability resolution, MOF-compliant, standard proposed,...), several approaches require extending and/or modifying the CVL approach in different ways in order to fulfill the industrial needs for variability modeling in Software Product Lines. However, the community lacks a tool that would enable proposed extensions and the integration of novel approaches to be put into practice. Existing tools that provide support for CVL are incomplete or are mainly focused on the variability model's editor, instead of executing the resolution of the variability over the base models. Moreover, there is no API that allows direct interaction with the CVL engine to extend or use it in an independent application. In this paper, we identify the extension points of the CVL approach with the goal of making the CVL engine more flexible, and to help software architects in the task of resolving the variability of their products. The practical tool presented here is a working implementation of the CVL engine, that can be extended through a proposed API.