Reactive Variability Management in Agile Software Development

Agile organizations focus on developing software systems that satisfy their current customer base, without worrying about best practices to handle variations of requirements in the system. Scaling agile methods up to adopt variability management practices in their traditional form is challenging. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and we contribute a lightweight, iterative approach that enables agile organizations to manage variability on demand in a reactive manner. The approach relies on agile practices like iterative development, refactoring, and continuous integration and testing. We present a case study to show how the approach was used to handle variability arising from technical and usability issues, and we provide a discussion of the advantages and limitations of the approach.