Modelling variants - anyone ?

[mikewhit]

Of course I've Googled, but does anyone have any experience of EA modelling a project with variants?

By this I mean a family of products/systems which share a common set of components, or architecture, but which differ in some organised way.

For example, an electricity meter might exist in single-phase / three-phase and domestic / industrial variants.
It might also have current transformer / Hall-effect sensor variants.

Many of the components (and requirements) would be the same, but some might be slightly or completely different,  or only differ in multiplicity.

You wouldn't really want a completely different model for each variant, not if you wanted to avoid mistakes and enhance design reuse.

My first thought would be to work backwards from a component model of each variant ...

[sargasso]

Mike,
Dont know if this helps, but did you find this one:

http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/Walking_through_A_UML_Design.pdf

bruce

[mikewhit]

Thanks Bruce, nice example of using OO, but not exactly what I had in mind, since it just allows flexibility at the class level.
Maybe my 'electricity meter' example was not quite right.

We want to have pretty much a full model (inc Requirements and Tests) of each variant, since it's not just a case of 'vanilla version with add-ons'.
eg.http://www.theoinf.tu-ilmenau.de/~riebisch/publ/idpt2000-paper.pdf

And yet we don't want to simply copy the packages between separate models.

<vapourware>
Actually, what would work really well would be a 'Virtual Model'^TM mechanism whereby with some variation of (perhaps) a Deployment diagram, you specified which model components you were including in your Instantiation of a model.

Once you had this set up, you would be able to create instantiated models from existing components. The virtual model would contain all the links and changes between the components used, and all the specifics.

How about it, Sparx ?! Does anyone else do this ?
I have seen other posts requesting the ability to reuse parts of models, and this would satisfy some of those requests.

I see, you want me to write the Custom View AddIn ...

Anyway, back to Earth ...

[mikewhit]

I must have a look here:http://www.pearsoned.co.uk/bookshop/detail.asp?affid=TRE&t=195&item=298143
Designing Software Product Lines with UML

Has anyone read this book ?

[Pascal]

Yep, I recently read through the book. I wasn't too thrilled with it. It mainly focusses on ways of classifying all kinds of UML elements (mainly with stereotypes) so that it is easy to distinguish between "kernel", "optional" elements and such. I was hoping to find more on the subject of what typical design decision are one comes across in modeling product lines and what best practices are available on this subject. Unfortunately, the book doesn't go there...

Still the provided classifications might be enough for you, Mike!