Analyzing variability in software variants with the variant comparison technique

Software systems are often tailored to individual customer needs. Consequently, these adaptations result in creation of multiple variants of the system. Maintenance and evolution of multiple variants impose a challenge on development organizations because the variation points are often neither explicitly known nor managed, and emerge uncontrolled. In this paper, we describe a technique that allows for reconstructing the variation points on the level of software architecture. The technique - called variant comparison - was successfully applied both internally and in industrial context. In a quasi-experiment, we evaluated the technique for its potential to reduce the effort needed for architecture-level variability analysis. On average, the participants using the variant comparison technique completed identical tasks in 35% less time than the reference group.