About the VariBru project
Motivation
Driven by customers that are increasingly cost-conscious and demanding, software-intensive product builders (i.e. companies building a product with an important software component) have to become customer intimate and compete on the basis of giving customers exactly what they need. Customer intimacy and mass customization are therefore business strategies adopted by a growing number of companies. This forces such companies to face several variability challenges with respect to managing all the variants of their products.
At the same time, software is being recognized as a powerful tool for differentiation and innovation in all kind of products. It is a dominant trend that products become software enabled.
Driven by these two major business trends, a large number of companies is forced to deal with the variability in their products at the software level. The ability to implement an efficient and effective software variability strategy is therefore an important prerequisite to excel as a product builder.
Reaching the desired level of variability in a cost-efficient way confronts software-intensive product builders with a challenging variability paradox: “How to remain efficient and effective while at the same time offer a much richer product variety to customers?”
Goals
The VariBru project addresses this strategic problem of software-intensive product builders. Its innovation goals are to:
- Perform research in four industrially relevant domains of software variability: software variability management, software product configurability, variability in live contexts, and variability in intention-aware products.
- Develop a portfolio of services in these four domains to help companies address their specific variability challenges.
- Use these services as a first step in the deployment of the Brussels center of excellence in the domain of software variability (VariSquare).
- Research and point out the critical success factors for establishing this VariSquare center of excellence.
