Handling Variability and Traceability over SPL Disciplines

SPL has proven to be a successful approach in many business environments (Clements & Northrop, 2001a; Pohl et al., 2005a). Nevertheless, the SPL advantages do not come for free. They demand mature software engineering, planning and reuse, adequate practices of management and development, and also the ability to deal with organizational issues and architectural complexity. If these points are not considered, the product line success could be missed (Birk & Heller, 2007). Therefore, the development should be supported by auxiliar methods and tools, specially due to the complexity of the software systems that a SPL is supposed to deal with, represented by the variabilities.