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To Merge or Not to Merge: Managing Software Product Families

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Book cover Grand Timely Topics in Software Engineering (GTTSE 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10223))

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Abstract

A large number of companies, especially in the automotive, electronics, aerospace and defense domains, develop a portfolio of closely related software products designed to satisfy similar, yet not identical, needs of their customers (a.k.a. a software product line). Even though numerous software product line engineering approaches promise to ease the product line development and maintenance effort, in practice, the adoption of such approaches is still limited. Instead, products are often established ad-hoc, e.g., by copying existing variants and modifying them to fit the requirements of a new customer or market segment.

In this paper, we discuss reasons leading organizations to employ cloning to realize their product lines. We then present two strategies for efficient management of cloned product variants: (1) the unification of the variants into single-copy representations promoted by product line engineering methods and (2) the construction of a management infrastructure on top of existing cloned variants, to mitigate the shortcomings of cloning while leveraging its benefits. We outline existing work that contributes to the implementation of these two strategies and identify opportunities for future research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We mostly focus on producing annotative SPL architectures: these architectures appear to be more intuitive to practitioners as they do not require a paradigm shift in the way software is being developed, especially in the embedded domain, where predecessor directives are commonly used [7, 49].

  2. 2.

    Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_(software_development).

  3. 3.

    We do not allow combining elements from the same variant. Hence, a tuple cannot contain elements from the same variant.

  4. 4.

    The similarity degree for a tuple is also referred to as the tuple weight.

  5. 5.

    http://splc.net/fame.html.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Julia Rubin

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  1. Julia Rubin
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. NOVA LINCS, Universidade nova de Lisboa , Lisbon, Portugal

    Jácome Cunha

  2. CISUC, Universida de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    João P. Fernandes

  3. Institut für Informatik, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany

    Ralf Lämmel

  4. Departamento de Informática, universidate do Minho, Braga, Portugal

    João Saraiva

  5. Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Holy See (Vatican City State)

    Vadim Zaytsev

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Rubin, J. (2017). To Merge or Not to Merge: Managing Software Product Families. In: Cunha, J., Fernandes, J., Lämmel, R., Saraiva, J., Zaytsev, V. (eds) Grand Timely Topics in Software Engineering. GTTSE 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10223. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60074-1_4

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