Visual Tool Support for Configuring and Understanding Software Product Lines

Software product lines of industrial size can easily incorporate thousands of variation points. This scale of variability can become extremely complex to man-age resulting in a product development process that bears significant costs. One technique that can be ap-plied beneficially in this context is visualisation. Visu-alisation is widely used in software engineering and has proven useful to amplify human cognition in data intensive applications. Adopting this technique in soft-ware product line engineering can help stakeholders in supporting essential work tasks and in enhancing their understanding of large and complex product lines. This paper introduces a meta-model and accompa-nied research tool that employs visualisation tech-niques to support fundamental product line develop-ment tasks. The meta-model specifies major entities such as decisions, features, and components and rela-tionships among them. We discuss which tasks can be supported based on the meta-model and show exam-ples of how these tasks can be further enhanced by utilising interactive visualisation techniques imple-mented in our tool.