Anders Hellström, Björn Pileryd:
Controlling the variant explosion - Enforcing stability in highly configurable large scale software,
summary, report, September 2005.

Abstract:
The market for mobile phones is rapidly growing. The product lifetime of a mobile phone is now down to about a year in Europe and just a few months in Japan. The software functionality has become very complex and the operators and the users require that the products can be customized to meet their specific needs.

This forces the producers to rapidly create many variants of the products. The software must be highly configurable while on the same time modular and stable. The overall goal of the master thesis work is to enforce the software development environment to meet this challenge.

The report consists of three parts. The first part is to investigate methods to configure software variants in a more dynamic way than it is done today and develop a tool to compose and build software variants. The second is to investigate how to visualize dependencies between the configuration variables extracted from the configuration files which are used to configure the different products, and the third part is to investigate how a framework of rules can be used to validate the configuration files. Beside the actual results the report consists of suggestions of future work that Sony Ericsson can conduct in this area.