Visualising variability relationships in software product lines

Software Product Line Engineering is a development paradigm that focuses on the identification and management of the commonalities and variability of a set of software products such that core assets can be developed and (re)used to derive individual product variants with a minimum of cost. In industrial product lines where it is possible to have thousands of variation points, the scale of variability can become extremely difficult to manage. In this position paper we elaborate on our ideas of focussing the representation and visualisation on the variability relationships that exist between different product line elements such as decisions, features and components and not on those elements that they relate. Further, we provide a conceptual three-dimensional visualisation technique to manage these relationships in the context of specific stakeholder tasks.