Context

More and more, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are using software to augment the functionality of their products and offerings. Variability management of software is becoming an interesting topic for SMEs with expanding portfolios and increasingly complex product structures. While the use of software product lines to resolve high variability is well known in larger organizations, there is less known about the practices in SMEs.

Objective

This paper presents results from a survey of software developing SMEs. The purpose of the paper is to provide a snapshot of the current awareness and practices of variability modeling in organizations that are developing software with the constraints present in SMEs.

Method

A survey with questions regarding the variability practices was distributed to software developing organizations in a region of Sweden that has many SMEs. The response rate was 13% and 25 responses are used in this analysis.

Results

We find that, although there are SMEs that develop implicit software product lines and have relatively sophisticated variability structures for their solution space, the structures of the problem space and the product space have room for improvement.

Conclusions

The answers in the survey indicate that SMEs are in situations where they can benefit from more structured variability management, but the awareness need to be raised. Even though the problem space similarity is high, there is little reuse and traceability activities performed. The existence of SMEs with qualified variability management and product line practices indicates that small organizations are capable to apply such practices.



This report describes the background and future of research concerning integrated management of requirements in model-based software engineering.

The focus is on describing the relevant topics and existing theoretical backgrounds that form the basis for the research. The report describes the fundamental difficulties of requirements engineering for software projects, and proposes that the results and methods of models in software engineering can help leverage those problems. Taking inspiration from the advances of domain engineering, software product lines, and the application family concepts, the research topic described aims to facilitate requirements engineering utilizing modeling of commonality and variability. The primary vessel for this is feature models, describing the capabilities and potential of the set of products under consideration. The research will evolve the existing modeling notions such as meta-models and methodologies to suit the needs of requirements engineering.