Composing annotations without regret? Practical experiences using FeatureC

Abstract

Software product lines enable developers to derive similar products from a common code base. Existing implementation techniques can be categorized as composition-based and annotation-based approaches, with both approaches promising complementary benefits. However, annotation-based approaches are commonly used in practice despite composition allowing physical separation of features and, thus, improving traceability and maintenance. A main hindrance to migrate annotated systems toward a composition-based product line is the challenging and time-consuming transformation task. For a company, it is difficult to predict the corresponding costs, and a successful outcome is uncertain. To overcome such problems, a solution proposed by the previous work is to use a hybrid approach, utilizing composition and annotation simultaneously. Based on this idea, we introduce a stepwise migration process from annotation-based toward composition-based approaches to lower the adoption barrier of composition. This process itself is independent of used implementation techniques and enables developers to incrementally migrate toward composition. We support our approach with detailed examples by partially migrating a real-world system.In detail, we describe the following: (1) our migration process, (2) its application on a real-world system, and (3) discuss practical challenges we face. We implemented the proposed approach and show that appropriate tool support helps to migrate toward composition-based product lines. Based on the case study, we show that the hybrid product lines work correctly and can compete with the performance of the original annotated system. However, the results also illustrate open issues that have to be solved to apply such migrations in practice.

Are You Talking about Software Product Lines? An Analysis of Developer Communities

“…While one is only concerned with loading feature model formats, the other question is actually interested in transforming or updating the variability mechanism (i.e., 37486472). This supports research that has been conducted in this direction [12,19]. • Finally, we found one question (i.e., 3753417) that is concerned with developing similar domain-specific languages (DSLs) as software product lines, already in 2010.…”

Integrating the common variability language with multilanguage annotations for web engineering

“…All these approaches [11,29,31,34,35] are useful in the scenarios of refactoring annotated SPL in order to utilize, or to migrate toward, composition; and to adopt SPLs from legacy systems (the extractive approach) [2]. In particular, Benduhn et al [11] apply the integration approach proposed by Kästner and Apel [28] in a real case study, by migrating Berkeley DB from C preprocessors annotations toward partial composition.…”

“…Concretely, they extend the idea of preprocessors to support composition and enable physical separation of concerns similar to FOP. In [34], the migration process from annotation-based toward composition-based approaches is applied to the Berkeley DB case study. In contrast to them [34,35], we propose just the contrary with CVL, that is, we introduce annotations into a composition-based approach.…”

“…In this paper, we propose to integrate annotations into a composition-based approach, contrary to other approaches that extend annotations with composition mechanisms [34,35]. Concretely, we use the Common Variability Language (CVL) [20] as a compositionbased approach and integrate annotations to manage fine-grained variability of an SPL for web applications.…”

Don't Worry About it

“…Thus, we facilitate and support the developer while refactoring the cloned systems, reducing the costs and risks of extractions [12,30]. Furthermore, we can support the step of locating features and deriving a variability model, which can only be semi-automated [9,23,31,32].…”