Dynamically Evolving the Structural Variability of Dynamic Software Product Lines

A Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL) is a widely used approach to handle variability at runtime, e.g., By activating or deactivating features to adapt the running configuration. With the emergence of highly configurable and evolvable systems, DSPLs have to cope with the evolution of their structural variability, i.e., The Feature Model (FM) used to derive the configuration. So far, little is known about the evolution of the FM while a configuration derived from this FM is running. In particular, such a dynamic evolution changes the DSPL configuration space, which is thus unsynchronized with the running configuration and its adaptation capabilities. In this position paper, we propose and describe an initial architecture to manage the dynamic evolution of DSPLs and their synchronization. In particular, we explain how this architecture supports the evolution of DSPLs based on FMs extended with cardinality and attributes, which, to the best of our knowledge, has never been addressed yet.