Synchronizing software variants with variantsync

Pfofe, Tristan; Thüm, Thomas; Schulze, Sandro; Fenske, Wolfram; Schaefer, Ina

doi:10.1145/2934466.2962726

Cited by 41 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…For comparison, we extracted activities supported by techniques for supporting clone&own (a.k.a., clone management), or the migration of cloned variants to an integrated platform (a.k.a., product-line migration). In total, we extracted 12 activities which we found to be common across most, if not all, existing Feature identification ^ abstract operator [51], specified in the beginning [52], [54], [53], specified any time in virtual platform…”

Section: A Comparative Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Seamless Variability Management with the Virtual Platform

Mahmood

Strüber

Berger

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

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Customization is a general trend in software engineering, demanding systems that support variable stakeholder requirements. Two opposing strategies are commonly used to create variants: software clone&own and software configuration with an integrated platform. Organizations often start with the former, which is cheap, agile, and supports quick innovation, but does not scale. The latter scales by establishing an integrated platform that shares software assets between variants, but requires high up-front investments or risky migration processes. So, could we have a method that allows an easy transition or even combine the benefits of both strategies? We propose a method and tool that supports a truly incremental development of variantrich systems, exploiting a spectrum between both opposing strategies. We design, formalize, and prototype the variabilitymanagement framework virtual platform. It bridges clone&own and platform-oriented development. Relying on programminglanguage-independent conceptual structures representing software assets, it offers operators for engineering and evolving a system, comprising: traditional, asset-oriented operators and novel, feature-oriented operators for incrementally adopting concepts of an integrated platform. The operators record meta-data that is exploited by other operators to support the transition. Among others, they eliminate expensive feature-location effort or the need to trace clones. Our evaluation simulates the evolution of a real-world, clone-based system, measuring its costs and benefits.

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Section: A Comparative Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Feature location ^ abstract operator [51], extracted [52], [53], internal tagging [54], also internal tagging in virtual platform…”

Section: A Comparative Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seamless Variability Management with the Virtual Platform

Mahmood

Strüber

Berger

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

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“…This challenge complicates using clonemanagement frameworks proposed in the literature (Pfofe et al 2016;Rubin et al 2012Rubin et al , 2013aAntkiewicz et al 2014) and techniques for integrating variants (Fischer et al 2014;Martinez et al 2015), since existing variability needs to be taken into account.…”

Section: Limitations Of Clone-management Techniquesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Clone Management Enhancing the governance, an organization could adopt a clonemanagement framework. Such frameworks (Rubin et al 2012(Rubin et al , 2013aPfofe et al 2016;Antkiewicz et al 2014) have been proposed, but have not found any documented adoption. They allow managing clones by using features as the main entities of reuse (instead of code assets) and record meta-data about the clones.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The state of adoption and the challenges of systematic variability management in industry

et al. 2020

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Handling large-scale software variability is still a challenge for many organizations. After decades of research on variability management concepts, many industrial organizations have introduced techniques known from research, but still lament that pure textbook approaches are not applicable or efficient. For instance, software product line engineering-an approach to systematically develop portfolios of products-is difficult to adopt given the high upfront investments; and even when adopted, organizations are challenged by evolving their complex product lines. Consequently, the research community now mainly focuses on reengineering and evolution techniques for product lines; yet, understanding the current state of adoption and the industrial challenges for organizations is necessary to conceive effective techniques. In this multiple-case study, we analyze the current adoption of variability management techniques in twelve medium-to large-scale industrial cases in domains such as automotive, aerospace or railway systems. We identify the current state of variability management, emphasizing the techniques and concepts they adopted. We elicit the needs and challenges expressed for these cases, triangulated with results from a literature review. We believe our results help to understand the current state of adoption and shed light on gaps to address in industrial practice.

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“…Moreover, SuperMod relies on an ambition provided by the engineer, that is, the definition of the feature, which has been changed for determining the feature-to-code mappings, whereas in our approach these mappings are computed automatically by ECCO. A different approach for supporting the development of software variants is VariantSync (Pfofe et al, 2016). It allows to synchronize changes in source code between different variants.…”

Section: Variant Management and Variation Control Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting feature-oriented evolution in industrial automation product lines

Hinterreiter

Linsbauer

Feichtinger

et al. 2020

Concurrent Engineering

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In the domain of industrial automation companies nowadays need to serve a mass market while at the same time customers demand highly customized solutions. To tackle this problem, companies frequently define software product lines (SPLs), which allow to automatically derive and further customize individual solutions based on a common platform. SPLs rely on defining common and variable platform features together with mappings, which define how the features are realized in implementation artifacts. In concurrent engineering such a feature-oriented process is challenged by the evolution of features, the complexity of feature-to-artifact mappings, and the diversity of the implementation artifacts. To address these challenges this paper introduces an approach supporting feature-oriented development and evolution in industrial SPLs. We outline the key elements and operations of our approach, including an implementation in a development environment. We report results of evaluating our approach regarding functional correctness, usefulness, and scalability based on a case study of a Pick-and-Place Unit (PPU) and an industrial case system.

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Synchronizing software variants with variantsync

Cited by 41 publications

References 30 publications

Seamless Variability Management with the Virtual Platform

Seamless Variability Management with the Virtual Platform

The state of adoption and the challenges of systematic variability management in industry

Supporting feature-oriented evolution in industrial automation product lines

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