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Mathematicians first used the sign 4-l without in the least knowing what it could mean, because it shortened work and led to correct results. People naturally tried to find out why this happened and what d-1 really meant. After two hundred years thy succeeded.-W. W. Sawyer, Mathematician's Delight, 1943.

a b s t r a c tOver the last two decades, software product lines have been used successfully in industry for building families of systems of related products, maximizing reuse, and exploiting their variable and configurable options. In a changing world, modern software demands more and more adaptive features, many of them performed dynamically, and the requirements on the software architecture to support adaptation capabilities of systems are increasing in importance. Today, many embedded system families and application domains such as ecosystems, service-based applications, and self-adaptive systems demand runtime capabilities for flexible adaptation, reconfiguration, and post-deployment activities. However, as traditional software product line architectures fail to provide mechanisms for runtime adaptation and behavior of products, there is a shift toward designing more dynamic software architectures and building more adaptable software able to handle autonomous decision-making, according to varying conditions. Recent development approaches such as Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs) attempt to face the challenges of the dynamic conditions of such systems but the state of these solution architectures is still immature. In order to provide a more comprehensive treatment of DSPL models and their solution architectures, in this research work we provide an overview of the state of the art and current techniques that, partially, attempt to face the many challenges of runtime variability mechanisms in the context of Dynamic Software Product Lines. We also provide an integrated view of the challenges and solutions that are necessary to support runtime variability mechanisms in DSPL models and software architectures.

The formal methods community is in general very good at undertaking research into the mathematical aspects of formal methods, but not so good at promulgating the use of formal methods in an engineering environment and at an industrial scale. Technology transfer is an extremely important part of the overall e ort necessary in the acceptance of formal techniques. This paper explores some of the more informal aspects of applying formal methods and presents some maxims with associated discussion that may help in the application of formal methods in an industrial setting. A signi cant bibliography is included, providing pointers to more technical and detailed aspects.Why does this magni cent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it. { Albert Einstein

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