Questionnaire-based variability modeling for system configuration

Abstract. Variability management is a recurrent issue in systems engineering. It arises for example in enterprise systems, where modules are configured and com-posed to meet the requirements of individual customers based on modifications to a reference model. It also manifests itself in the context of software product fam-ilies, where variants of a system are built from a common code base. This paper proposes an approach to capture system variability based on questionnaire mod-els that include order dependencies and domain constraints. The paper presents analysis techniques to detect circular dependencies and contradictory constraints in questionnaire models, as well as techniques to incrementally prevent invalid configurations by restricting the space of allowed answers to a question based on previous answers. The approach has been implemented as a toolset and has been used in practice to capture configurable process models for film post-production