Many modern-day software systems exploit knowledge about their user’s preferences and the environment, to trigger runtime adaptations so that they exhibit smart behavior adapted to the current situation. Such variability must happen dynamically at postdeployment time, and the variety of runtime scenarios is huge. Techniques for modeling and managing dynamic variability on the basis of context knowledge provide a powerful solution for many runtime reconfiguration challenges. This special issue provides an updated perspective on such techniques to manage variability at runtime, as a way to make software systems smarter and less dependent on human intervention.
Mens, K., Capilla, R., Hartmann, H., & Kropf, T. (2017). Modeling and Managing Context-Aware Systems’ Variability. IEEE Software, 34, 58-63. https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2017.4121225 (Original work published 2017)