Modeling scenario variability as crosscutting mechanisms

Variability management is a common challenge for Software Product Line (SPL) adoption, since developers need suit- able mechanisms for specifying and implementing variabil- ity that occurs at different SPL artifacts (requirements, de- sign, implementation, and test). In this paper, we present a novel approach for use case scenario variability manage- ment, enabling a better separation of concerns between lan- guages used to manage variabilities and languages used to specify use case scenarios. The result is that both represen- tations can be understood and evolved in a separate way. We achieve such a goal by modeling variability management as a crosscutting phenomenon, for the reason that artifacts such as feature models, product configurations, and config- uration knowledge crosscut each other with respect to each specific SPL member. After applying our approach to dif- ferent case studies, we achieved a better feature modularity and scenario cohesion.