VARIABILITY 2026
Tue 29 September - Fri 2 October 2026

Software-intensive product lines are often deployed in mature product markets. As a product line grows in scale and scope there are few methods for assessing the similarity between proposed and existing products. This is important for effective product line management, brand management, product positioning, and evaluations against legislation. This tutorial describes an easily automated product comparison method and discusses its benefits and limitations using a mobile phone example. A product line feature model shows how features are interconnected. New products are configured from the model by making feature selections. Such a set of selections can be represented as a weighted binary string where 1 represents a selected feature, and 0 represents an unselected feature, and each weight represents a feature’s relative importance. Weights can be calculated using feature centrality metrics. Products can then be compared using feature similarity matching with weighted binary string similarity metrics. At the end of this tutorial, participants will be able to (i) discuss motivations for product line engineering and product comparisons (ii) describe one method for conducting product comparisons (iii) explain outstanding challenges.

Tue 29 Sep

Displayed time zone: Athens change

14:00 - 15:30
Product Comparison using Feature Similarity Matching (part I)Tutorials at PANORAMA
14:00
90m
Talk
Product Comparison using Feature Similarity Matching
Tutorials
Mike Mannion Glasgow Caledonian University, Hermann Kaindl
16:00 - 17:30
Product Comparison using Feature Similarity Matching (Part II)Tutorials at PANORAMA
16:00
90m
Talk
Product Comparison using Feature Similarity Matching
Tutorials
Mike Mannion Glasgow Caledonian University, Hermann Kaindl