Visualizing Product Line Domain Variability by Aspect-Oriented Modeling

Modeling variability is a core problem in software product line engineering. The relationship between variability and commonality in a software product line bears strong similarities to the relationship between crosscutting concerns and core concerns in aspect-oriented modeling. So modeling variability with aspect-oriented techniques is an obvious idea which has been exploited before to some extent. In this paper, we propose a new approach to modeling and visualizing variability by a combination of aspect-oriented variability modeling with table-based modeling of configuration possibilities and constraints. As a modeling language, we use a slightly extended version of the ADORA language. Our main contributions are a visual, integrated model comprising both the commonality and the variability of the product line and a novel mechanism for synthesizing products from this model based on the aspect weaving capabilities of ADORA.