Development of flexible software process lines with variability operations: A longitudinal case study

Abstract

Context: A software process line helps to systematically develop and manage families of processes and, as part of this, variability operations provide means to modify and reuse predefined process assets. Objective: Our goal is to evaluate the feasibility of variability operations to support the development of flexible software process lines. Method: We conducted a longitudinal study in which we studied 5 variants of the V-Modell XT process line for 2 years. Results: Our results show the variability operation instrument feasible in practice. We analyzed 616 operation exemplars addressing various customization scenarios, and we found 87 different operation types. Conclusions: Although variability operations are only one instrument among others, our results suggest this instrument useful to implement variability in real-life software process lines. This summary refers to the paper Development of Flexible Software Process Lines with Variability Operations: A Longitudinal Case Study [Do15]. This paper was published as full research paper in the EASE'2015 proceedings.