Managing variability in software product lines

Variability management (VM) is a fundamental activity of software product line engineering (SPLE). VM explicitly represents software artifact variations for managing dependencies among SPL variants and support their instantiations throughout the SPL life cycle. It involves complex and challenging tasks, which must be supported by effective methods, techniques, and tools. Researchers have studied these challenges and proposed solutions to them for nearly 20 years. This article reports results from a study to systematically review the research and synthesize the evidence regarding the effectiveness of proposed solutions. One Web extra offers a systematic literature review of a study in which the authors assessed 97 papers that either claimed or provided some kind of evaluation of a variability management approach, technique, or tool. The other Web extra is an erratum to this article.