2 Language based on the look and feel of a car infotainment system
234 DSM LANGUAGE DEFINITION
between different products or features. Long term success in de?¬?ning a language here
depends largely on your capability to predict what kind of variation space is needed in
future products. Note that although this kind of language can most often be found in
product-line development, it does not necessitate having multiple products: Variation
also exists among features of a single product.
Language de?¬?nition based on variability comes down to conducting a thorough
domain analysis (Weiss and Lai, 1999): Identifying which abstractions are the same
for all applications and which are different. Static variation is usually easy to cope
with??”developers have been making parameter tables and wizards to choose among
alternatives for decades. Things get more complicated when the parameter choices
depend on other parameter choices and here feature modeling (Kang et al., 1990) is
useful and often applied along with con?¬?guration tools. Note that variation at the code
level is not so relevant here since a generator may produce the required code to one or
more places in various ?¬?les to implement the variability. Parameter and feature choice
approaches usually break down if we also want to tackle variability that is of a
dynamic nature, or if we want to create new features and functionality inside the
current variation space.
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