Paper Info
Title
Concepts, Operations, and Feasibility of a Projection-Based Variation Control System
Abstract
Highly configurable software often uses preprocessor annotations to handle variability. However, understanding, maintaining, and evolving code with such annotations is difficult, mainly because a developer has to work with all variants at a time. Dedicated methods and tools that allow working on a subset of all variants could ease the engineering of highly configurable software. We investigate the potential of one kind of such tools: projection-based variation control systems. For such systems we aim to understand: (i) what end-user operations they need to support, and (ii) whether they can realize the actual evolution of real-world, highly configurable software. We conduct an experiment that investigates variability-related evolution patterns and that evaluates the feasibility of a projection-based variation control system by replaying parts of the history of a highly configurable real-world 3D printer firmware project. Among others, we show that the prototype variation control system does indeed support the evolution of a highly configurable system and that in general, it does not degrade the code.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/ICSME.2016.88
2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
Keywords
Field
DocType
variability management,variation control system,projectional editing,projection,ambition
3d printer,Programming language,Systems engineering,Software engineering,Computer science,Software,Preprocessor,Control system,Firmware
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-6773
978-1-5090-3807-7
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
13
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Stefan Stanciulescu1523.65
Thorsten Berger260334.35
Eric Walkingshaw321615.74
Andrzej Wasowski4128260.47