PLE TV: Markus Völter Talks About Managing Variability in Product-Lines

A nice video (about 1 hour) of Markus’ presentation at JAOO 2007. In this presentation (as PDF) he explains general variability concepts and then goes into detail on variability in MDSD, more specifically into a case study done by Siemens as part of the AMPLE project.

I agree to most what he says and much liked the parts showing pure::variants . Just to make it clear, I do think that in many cases a combination of variability concepts like positive (composition) and negative variability (selection&configuration) makes very much sense. Rule of thumb is to find the most simple way to express the variability with respect to the stakeholders who should understand the available variability. And often feature models are a good choice for this, especially when non-technical stakeholders are involved.