Introduction to the track on variability modeling for scalable software evolution

Information and communication technology today is increasingly integrated into the environment we live in, distributed on cars, appliances and smart infrastructures. The software running on these devices is increasingly individualized, adapted to the preferences and needs of the specific customer and must be able to evolve after deployment by means of software patches. Upgrades are becoming individualized; software patches used to upgrade the software are selected and adapted depending on the configuration and external constraints of the host device. The objective of the European project HyVar is to develop techniques and tools for fast and customizable software design, for the management of highly distributed applications, for continuous software evolution of remote devices, and scalable infrastructure to accommodate a large number of devices. The track Variability Modeling for Scalable Software Evolution aims to foster cooperation opportunities and create synergies between related research directions to address challenges stemming from software variability, evolution, and cloud technology for highly distributed applications in heterogeneous environments. This paper introduces the track and its individual contributions. This paper contains an introduction to the ISoLA’16 track organized in the context of the EU H2020 project 644298 HyVar: Scalable Hybrid Variability for Distributed Evolving Software Systems (http://www.hyvar-project.eu).