Design for the analysis of variability management in the industry

Software Product Lines (SPL) enable systematic reuse within an organization, which reduces costs, effort, development time and the average number of defects per product. However, there is no empirical evidence on the adoption of SPLs in software development companies for product customization. To assess the need for SPL technologies in real software development, it is necessary to analyze the variability practices in companies to develop their products, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of their approaches. To this end, we present the design of a study to evaluate how companies perform variability management. We start from the assumption that most companies manage variability, but not many of them are aware of the software product lines.