On 14 July 2026, David Romero Organvídez successfully defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Seville, earning his PhD with International Doctorate Mention with the maximum grade. The thesis, titled “UVLHub: An Open Science Ecosystem for the Universal Variability Language”, was supervised by Dr. David Benavides and Dr. José A. Galindo, both members of Diverso Lab.
The work addresses a long-standing problem in software product line engineering: feature models, the de facto standard for representing variability and commonalities in software systems, have often been scattered across private repositories, incompatible formats, or discontinued projects. This dispersion has made it difficult for researchers and practitioners to find, reuse, and study these artefacts.
At the core of the thesis is UVLHub, a repository of feature models built on the Universal Variability Language (UVL), a community driven textual language that allows feature models to be serialised in a common format independent of any specific tool. UVLHub provides a front end to search, upload, store, and manage feature model datasets, and it does so following open science principles of transparency, accessibility, and collaboration.
UVLHub integrates with two key pieces of the variability modelling landscape. It connects to Zenodo, one of the most established open science repositories, to guarantee permanent preservation of datasets and assign persistent identifiers. It also integrates with flamapy, enabling the automated analysis of the feature models hosted on the platform. Together, these integrations turn UVLHub into more than a repository and position it as a full ecosystem for sharing and analysing variability models. The project is maintained by three universities active in variability modelling and is openly available at uvlhub.io and on GitHub at github.com/diverso-lab/uvlhub.
As the technology leader of the UVLHub project, David has been central to bringing this vision to life, contributing not only the platform itself but also improvements to the UVL language along the way.
From Diverso Lab, we warmly congratulate David on this milestone and thank his advisors, the examining committee, and everyone who accompanied him throughout this journey. We look forward to the next chapter of his research career.
Comments (0)