Visualisation techniques to support derivation tasks in software product line development

Adopting a software product line approach allows companies to realise significant improvements in time-to-market, cost, productivity, and system quality. A fundamental problem in software product line engineering is the fact that a product line of industrial size can easily incorpo-rate several thousand variation points. The scale and interdependencies can lead to variability management and product derivation tasks that are extremely complex to manage. This paper investigates visualisation techniques to support and improve the effectiveness of these tasks.