Title
Seamless Variability Management With the Virtual Platform
Abstract
ABSTRACTCustomization 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 variant-rich systems, exploiting a spectrum between both opposing strategies. We design, formalize, and prototype the variability-management framework virtual platform. It bridges clone&own and platform-oriented development. Relying on programming-language-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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00147
International Conference on Software Engineering
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
software product lines, variability management, clone management, re-engineering, framework
Conference
0270-5257
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wardah Mahmood102.03
Daniel Strüber211621.50
Thorsten Berger300.34
Ralf Lämmel410.72
Mukelabai Mukelabai5224.78