At this year’s FSE 2025 conference in Trondheim, we presented our vision paper “Beyond Software Families: Community-Driven Variability”. It’s about the beautiful chaos in open-source, decentralized software ecosystems – such as Bitcoin – that exhibit multi-dimensional variability, yet strive for interoperability. We discuss this phenomenon of Community-Driven Variability (CDV), highlight emerging problems, and outline research goals to tackle them.
The Software Engineering (SE) conference of the Software Engineering Division (SWT) of the German Informatics Society (GI) is the reference conference series on Software Engineering in the German-speaking regions of Europe with an established record of engaging with Academia and Industry. It is held annually, and it serves as a platform for both software engineers from industry and researchers from academia to share their experiences and knowledge and to foster community building.