Author Description

Variability management is a challenging issue in product line requirements engineering. Particular problems include the instantiation of variations for individual products, the long-term evolution of the product line, the rationale representation for variability and the support of issue-based communication between geographically distributed stakeholders. To address the problems, this dissertation proposes a new methodology called issue-based variability modeling by combining variability management and rationale management. Rationale management is a discipline in software engineering, which deals with the tacit knowledge that leads to a system design. To be able to empirically evaluate issue- based variability modeling, the meta-model of the rationale-based unified software engineering model (RUSE) is combined with the meta-model of the orthogonal variability model (OVM) to obtain a meta-model for issue-based variability modeling. Issue-based variability modeling has been implemented as a Java-based tool and was evaluated empirically using several empirical studies.