Variability viewpoint for introducing variability in software architecture viewpoints

Variability is the ability of a software system to be changed for a specific context, in a preplanned manner. As such, to facilitate the instantiation of a software architecture the variability concern needs to be explicitly addressed. Usually, architectural concerns are represented using architecture views that are derived from the corresponding architecture viewpoints. Different software architecture viewpoints have been introduced to support the modeling, understanding, communication and analysis of the software architecture for different stakeholders. Regarding variability we can observe that this has been mainly addressed in separate variability modeling approaches. In this paper we first provide a short overview of the approaches for dealing with variability at the architecture design level and then introduce the variability viewpoint. The variability viewpoint addresses the concerns for variability and can be used to introduce variability in software architecture viewpoints. Copyright 2012 ACM.