A Preliminary Assessment of Variability Implementation Mechanisms in Service-Oriented Computing

Service-Oriented Computing and Software Product Lines are software development strategies capable to provide a systematic means to reuse existing software assets, rather than repeatedly developing them from scratch, for every new software system. The inherent characteristics of both strategies has led the research community to combine them, in what is commonly referred to as Service-Oriented Product Lines (SOPL) strategies. Despite the perceived potential of such a combination, there are many challenges to confront in order to provide a practical generalizable solution. In particular, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the actual support of variability implementation mechanisms, typical in SPL engineering, and their suitability for SOPL. In line with such a challenge, this paper presents a preliminary assessment aimed to identify variability implementation mechanisms which may improve measures of complexity, instability and modularity, quality attributes particularly important for modular and reusable software systems, as is the case of SOPL. Based on the results of these evaluations, an initial decision model is developed to provide software engineers with an adequate support for the selection of variability mechanisms.