Development of a plug-in for Variability Modeling in Software Product Lines

Software Product Lines (SPL) take economic advantage of commonality and variability among a set of software systems that exist within a specific domain. Therefore, Software Product Line Engineering defines a series of processes for the development of a SPL that consider commonality and variability during the software life cycle. Variability modeling is therefore an essential activity in a Software Product Line Engineering approach. There are several techniques for variability modeling nowadays. COVAMOF stands out among them since it allows the modeling of variation points, variants and dependencies as first class elements. COVAMOF, therefore, provides an uniform manner for representing such concepts in different levels of abstraction within a SPL. In order to take advantage of COVAMOF benefits, it is necessary to have a computer aided tool, otherwise variability modeling and management canbe a hard tasks for the software engineer. This paper presents the development of a Eclipse plug-in for COVAMOF.