A Comparison of Visualization Concepts and Tools for Variant-Rich System Engineering

Software product-line engineering is concerned with developing a set of similar, yet customized, software systems that share a common codebase. To develop such a variant-rich system, various development processes, techniques, and tools have been studied in research and are used in practice. Specifically, to help developers manage the complexity of developing large-scale variant-rich systems, researchers have proposed visualizations to visually present different properties of such systems and their engineering - -such as feature models, configurations, the similarity of variants, or process traces. Two recent mapping studies have systematically elicited the state-of-the-art on such visualizations, but neither of them provides a comparative analysis of the underlying visualization concepts and tools. In this paper, we report a qualitative meta-analysis of the 64 papers that we primarily selected from these two mapping studies. Advancing on the previous studies, we compare the use cases, pros, cons, and relations between visualization concepts and tools used with respect to engineering variant-rich systems. Our results provide insights - -orthogonal to those from the mapping studies - -regarding the purposes for which visualization concepts are used and the tools that are available to implement these concepts. The overview we provide can help researchers as well as practitioners decide to use specific established visualization concepts or design new ones, and identify tools that can help them to implement these.