Requirements Variability Support Through MDA™ and Graph Transformation

One of the most important factors of success in the development of a software product line is the elicitation, management, and representation of variability. Feature models, are used as a key artifact to express requirements variability and are the basis for the domain architecture design. In this context, this article explores the possible advantages of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and shows an automated transformation from the feature model to the architecture model. This transformation is understood as a graph transformation process because it offers a natural way to represent model transformations. The transformation is applied by the definition of a simple context-sensitive graph grammar where production rules are obtained from metamodels of both feature and architecture models.