Title
Software Variability Management
Abstract for Web
In a variety of approaches to software development, software artifacts are used in multiple contexts or for various purposes. The differences lead to so-called variation points in the software artifact. During recent years, the amount of variability that has to be supported by a software artifact is growing considerably and its management is developing as a main challenge during development, usage, and evolution of software artifacts.
So far, variability management is recognized as a crosscutting concept in software engineering that has a key role in various areas but that is poorly understood as an issue in its own right. In different facets, variability management is part of many recent development approaches, including but not limited to object-oriented frameworks, design pattern, domain-oriented languages, generative programming, generic components, domain and requirements analysis, and software product families (also called software product lines).
Successful management of variability in software artifacts leads to better customizable software products that are in turn likely to result in higher market success: in the information systems domain, the products are more easily adaptable to the needs of different user groups; in the embedded systems domain, the software can be more easily configured to work with different hardware and environmental constraints.
This workshop is meant to explicitly address the management of variability in software artifacts from its different perspectives, bringing together representatives from different academic and industrial communities to share their experiences and ideas.
Background of the Organizers
Prof. dr. ir. Jan Bosch is a professor of software engineering at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where he heads the software engineering research group. He received a MSc degree from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and a PhD degree from Lund University, Sweden. His research activities include software architecture design, software product lines, object-oriented frameworks and component-oriented programming. He is the author of a book "Design and Use of Software Architectures: Adopting and Evolving a Product Line Approach" published by Pearson Education (Addison-Wesley & ACM Press), (co-)editor of three volumes in the Springer LNCS series and has (co-)authored more than 50 refereed journal and conference publications. He has organised numerous workshops, served on many programme committees, including the ICSR'6, CSMR'2000, ECBS'2000, GCSE, SPLC and TOOLS conferences and is member of the steering groups of the GCSE and WICSA conferences. He was the PC co-chair of the 3rd IFIP (IEEE) Working Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA-3) and is the general chair for WICSA-4.

Prof. Dr. Peter Knauber is professor of software engineering and project management at Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, Germany. From 1998 to 2002 he led the department for Software Product Lines at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), Germany. There he was responsible for several public and industrial projects where technology related to software product lines was developed and transferred into industrial practice and the advancement of the IESE product line method PuLSE™.
Peter Knauber is (co-)organizer of the international workshop series on Software Product Lines: Economics, Architectures, and Implications, held with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) from 2000 to 2002.