Embracing Software Variability to build Explainable Systems

This invited talk was presented at VAMOS 2024, the 18th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems.

Abstract: Software systems can be a rich resource of knowledge about their application domain, stakeholder requirements, design decisions, and technical infrastructure, but this knowledge is often hard to access and exploit. An *explainable system* is a software system that can quickly and accurately answer questions that humans ask about it. We show how explainable systems can be systematically constructed through *moldable development*, an approach in which existing, moldable tools, such as code editors, inspectors, debuggers and notebooks, can be molded to an arbitrary application domain by creating dozens, hundreds or thousands of cheap, custom tools. This is made possible by enabling fine-grained variability in moldable tools.
In contrast to conventional plug-in architectures, moldable tools adapt themselves to the dynamic context of live objects in the development environment, thus supporting navigation and exploration within an explainable system. Variability in the environment thus becomes the key to explaining variability in the software systems themselves. We will illustrate the approach through numerous examples gained over several years of experience with moldable development.

[curiositydrivendevelopment]

1:00:35 - 1:02:43
I like the response to that question. Paraphrasing:
Question: "How are your developers sharing their tools and view?"
Answer: "We currently share using git and trunk-based-development with quickly falling CI.
But we want to make it even more collaborative later and have some sort of web-hostable shared GToolkit image in the future"

I'm intrigued how much work would be needed for a quick prototype that has none or really simple conflict resolution facilities 🤔.
And I agree that it would be a really great thing to use for bigger teams.