Towards a Product Configuration Representation for the Universal Variability Language

Product configuration is a key process in Software Product Line (SPL) engineering to derive customer-specific variants based on configuration options and constraints defined in variability models and related engineering artifacts. However, based on one particular variability model, the product configuration process can be supported in various ways depending on the stakeholders’ preferences. For instance, the product configuration process can be performed incrementally (e.g., by hiding or showing unrelated configuration options or using different configuration sequences) and impose access control to limit the access of a certain user or role on certain configuration options during the configuration process. In this short paper, we propose a unified configuration representation to represent these preferences for the Universal Variability Language (UVL). We analyze the key functionalities needed in a product configuration tool and choose those that are relevant for developing our configuration representation. We also present our first proposal of the configuration representation. We conclude this paper by describing a research agenda on how to extend and evaluate this initial proposal.