Towards Integrated Variant Management in Global Software Engineering: An Experience Report

In the automotive domain, customer demands and market constraints are progressively realized by electric/
electronic components and corresponding software. Variant traceability in SPL is crucial in the context of different tasks, like change impact analysis, especially in complex global software projects. In addition, traceability concepts must be extended by partly automated variant configuration mechanisms to handle restrictions and dependencies between variants. Such variant configuration mechanism helps to reduce complexity when configuring a valid variant and to establish an explicit documentation of dependencies between components. However, integrated variant management has not been sufficiently addressed so far. Especially, the increasing number of software variants requires an examination of traceable and configurable software variants over the software lifecycle. This paper emphasizes variant traceability achievements in a large global software engineering project, elaborates existing challenges, and evaluates an industrial usage of an integrated variant management based on experiences.