Variability management in software product lines: a systematic review

Variability Management (VM) in Software Product Line (SPL) is a key activity that usually affects the degree to which a SPL is successful. SPL community has spent huge amount of resources on developing various approaches to dealing with variability related challenges over the last decade. To provide an overview of different aspects of the proposed VM approaches, we carried out a systematic literature review of the papers reporting VM in SPL. This paper presents and discusses the findings from this systematic literature review. The results reveal the chronological backgrounds of various approaches over the history of VM research, and summarize the key issues that drove the evolution of different approaches. This study has also identified several gaps that need to be filled by future efforts in this line of research.