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Variability evolution and erosion in industrial product lines: a case study

Published: 26 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Successful software products evolve continuously to meet the changing stakeholder requirements. For software product lines, modifying variability is an additional challenge that must be carefully tackled during the evolution of the product line. This bears considerable challenges for industry as understanding on how variability realizations advance over time is not trivial. Moreover, it may lead to an erosion of variability, which needs an investigation of techniques on how to identify the variability erosion in practice, especially in the source code. To address various erosion symptoms, we have investigated the evolution of a large-scale industrial product line over a period of four years. Along improvement goals, we have researched a set of appropriate metrics and measurement approaches in a goal-oriented way, applied them in this case study with tool support, and interpreted the results including identified erosion symptoms.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SPLC '13: Proceedings of the 17th International Software Product Line Conference
August 2013
286 pages
ISBN:9781450319683
DOI:10.1145/2491627
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • IPSJ: Information Processing Society of Japan

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 26 August 2013

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Author Tags

  1. industrial case study
  2. product line evolution
  3. static code analysis
  4. variability erosion

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • German state of Rhineland-Palatinate and Fraunhofer IESE

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SPLC 2013
Sponsor:
  • IPSJ

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Overall Acceptance Rate 167 of 463 submissions, 36%

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  • (2024)Tackling Erosion in Variant-Rich Software Systems: Challenges and ApproachesProcedia CIRP10.1016/j.procir.2024.06.033128(633-637)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Can instability variations warn developers when open-source projects boost?Empirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10482-429:4Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Approaching Pattern Catalogues for Variability Realization in Model-Based Systems and Software EngineeringProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3579027.3608997(254-260)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Comparing the intensity of variability changes in software product line evolutionJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111737203:COnline publication date: 13-Jul-2023
  • (2021)Variability realization in model-based system engineering using software product line techniquesProceedings of the 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3461001.3473060(25-34)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2021
  • (2021)20 years of industrial experience at SPLCProceedings of the 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3461001.3473059(172-183)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2021
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  • (2020)A Comparative Study on Variability Code Analysis TechnologyProceedings of the 24th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B10.1145/3382026.3425775(37-43)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2020
  • (2020)Experience Report on Variability Improvement in a Product Line Engineering Unaware CompanyProceedings of the 24th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B10.1145/3382026.3425771(21-28)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2020
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