A proposal for a variability management framework

Although the database schemas are an integral part of information systems, the use of software product lines has been mainly studied for the production of executable code. The impact on data management and in particular the database schemas are poorly documented and little studied in the literature. The paper is an attempt to explore some of the issues of the modeling and implementation of the variability in the database through the use of disciplined approaches. We propose a variability management framework. Motivations for developing the framework are three-fold: (a) to facilitate the comprehension of the discipline, (b) to classify and compare existing approaches to managing this discipline and (c) to extract their insufficiencies to propose an approach that remedies these insufficiencies and resolve problems related to this discipline. Finally, we introduce seven different variability management approaches and their instantiation according to the variability management framework.