Consistent Concepts for Variant-Management Tool Integrations during the Complete Product Lifecycle

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is an increasingly often employed approach for developing variant-rich software-intensive systems. Its basic idea is to exploit com-monalities of several similar, yet different products throughout the entire product life-cycle. To exploit commonalities, developers of software product lines need to explicitly define and manage the differences (variabilities) between products. This is not triv-ial, since variabilities can occur in all types of documents used throughout the product lifecycle. Due to the heterogenous nature of the used tools, the notations, in which vari-abilities are represented, differ greatly. Thus, developers need to learn a new approach for managing variability in each tool. To address this problem, pure::variants, a leading variant-management tool, integrates a variant-management user interface into several tools that are used frequently during the development of software-intensive systems. When using these tool integrations, users only need to have a rough idea how variabil-ity is represented in the respective tool. However, each tool provides different extension mechanisms. On the one hand, this introduces inconsistencies between integrations