Pages 61-81 Published online by RTU Press, https://csimq-journals.rtu.lv http://dx.Abstract. Common Variability Language (CVL) is a recent proposal for OMG's upcoming Variability Modeling standard. CVL models variability in terms of Model Fragments. Usability is a widely-recognized quality criterion essential to warranty the successful use of tools that put these ideas in practice. Facing the need of evaluating the usability of CVL modeling tools, this paper presents a Usability Evaluation of CVL applied to a Modeling Tool for firmware code of Induction Hobs. This evaluation addresses the configuration, scoping and visualization facets. The evaluation involved the end users of the tool whom are engineers of our Induction Hob industrial partner. Effectiveness and efficiency results indicate that model configuration in terms of model fragment substitutions is intuitive enough but both scoping and visualization require improved tool support. Results also enabled us to identify a list of usability problems which may contribute to alleviate scoping and visualization issues in CVL.

Researchers have been evaluating the benefits of Model-Driven Development (MDD) for more than a decade now. Although some works suggest that MDD decreases development time, other works limit MDD benefits to academic exercises and to developers without experience. To clarify the benefits of MDD, we present the results of our experiment, which compares MDD and Code-centric Development (CcD) in terms of correctness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Our experiment achieves fidelity to real-world settings because the tasks are taken from real-world video game development, and the subjects use domain frameworks as they are used in real-world developments. Our results challenge previous ideas that limit the benefits of MDD to academic exercises and to developers without experience. Furthermore, our results also suggest that understanding the benefits of MDD might require researchers to rethink their experiments to include the social part of software development.

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The ability to manage variability in software has become crucial to overcome the complexity and variety of systems. To this end, a comprehensible representation of variability is important. Nevertheless, in previous works, difficulties have been detected to understand variability in an industrial environment. Specifically, domain experts had difficulty understanding variability in model fragments to produce the software for their products. Hence, the aim of this paper is to further investigate these difficulties by conducting an experiment in which participants deal with variability in order to achieve their desired product configurations. Our results show new insights into product configuration which suggest next steps to improve general variability modeling approaches, and therefore promoting the adoption of these approaches in industry.