How dynamic is your dynamic software product line?

Recently, there have been increasing demands for the postponement of decisions on software adaptations and product variations to provide the flexibility required by dynamic environments and users. The goal is that software adaptations and product variations can be chosen even at runtime. As such, a research theme that addresses development issues for reusable and dynamically reconfigurable core assets has emerged and it is called dynamic software product lines (DSPLs) with its consequential need to manage runtime variability. Research on the use of runtime variability, however, is still heavily based on the specification of decisions during design time. That is, a system simply postpones”when to adapt” to runtime but”how to adapt” is already decided at design time. In this paper, we present a brief assessment of the current research in the area and discuss some research issues related to the feasibility of DSPL oriented approaches to build self-adaptive systems.