Improving variability management in a product line of embedded systems - a case study from industry

Many software development organizations have been developing corporate software components to benefit from reusing preexisting solutions instead of creating each of their products always from scratch. However, this has typically been done in an unsystematic way, that means without deliberately using a variability mechanism that supports system evolution. As the number of different products grows, it becomes more and more difficult to manage the variabilities and their interdependencies. This paper presents an industrial case study of applying PuLSE (Product Line Software Engineering), where we extracted the common and variable characteristics of a set of products from several embedded systems components, and improved their variability mechanisms incrementally.