Extending the SPES Modeling Framework for Supporting Role-specific Variant Management in the Engineering Process of Embedded Software

In many application domains embedded systems and the corresponding embedded software face an increase in sometimes mutual excluding stakeholder needs like requests from different customers or national legal obligations. In order to meet these needs variability is explicitly designed into the embedded software. Nowadays, in the engineering process of embedded software the variability information is explicitly documented in a dedicated variability model. Hence, the variability model comprises multiple variability-related concerns that are specific to different roles in the lifecycle of embedded software. Each role (e.g. product manager, requirements engineer, architect, maintenance engineer) requires only a specific subset of the variability information that is documented in the variability model to fulfill their certain responsibility. As a consequence, mechanisms for structuring the variability model with respect to the specific role-based variability-concerns are needed. In this paper we present an extension of a well-known model-based engineering framework for embedded software (the SPES Modeling Framework) in order to structure the overall variability model of the embedded software with respect to role-based variability-concerns.