IDOL: varIability moDeling & sOftware product Line

Developing software is a complex task. In addition to this complexity, nowadays? world is driven by high expectations expressed by end-users in front of software. For example, Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) must be adaptable to different contexts (e.g., desktop, tablet), and the running system in itself must be highly customisable according to the user needs. To tackle these challenges, the Software Product Line (SPL) paradigm leverages methods and tools initially developed in the automotive industry to represent "family of products" by capturing the variability of a given domain. For example, like a car can be manufactured with 3 or 5 doors, a piece of software can be deployed with a desktop GUI or a mobile GUI. An interesting challenge is that software (contrarily to manufactured goods that suffer from physical restrictions) can actually be deployed with a desktop and a mobile GUI, triggering new research challenges in the software engineering field with regard to software and GUI composition. Our lon g-term goal is to establish a sustainable collaboration between the two participating laboratories. The objective of the proposed AURORA collaboration is to leverage tools, methods and case studies developed by the two partners in the SPL domain to bootst rap such a sustainable collaboration, for example with the submission of an EU proposal at the end of the AURORA contract. From a scientific point of view, the objective of this collaboration is to merge our research efforts into one single direction: "th e systematic use of SPLs to support the design and implementation of complex and variable pieces of software".