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International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology

QUATIC 2021: Quality of Information and Communications Technology pp 67–81Cite as

Feature-Oriented Clone and Pull for Distributed Development and Evolution

Part of the Communications in Computer and Information Science book series (CCIS,volume 1439)

Abstract

Product line engineering aims at quickly delivering individual solutions to customers by customizing and evolving products based on a common platform. Engineers commonly follow a distributed and feature-oriented process, supported by version control systems, to track implementation-level changes. For instance, feature branches are widely used to add new or modify existing features. However, when merging back features to the product line, the information how features map to code is usually lost. Furthermore, the granularity of merging is limited to branches, making it hard to transfer individual features from one product to another. This paper thus presents feature-oriented clone and pull operations for the distributed development and evolution of product lines, which are implemented in the FORCE2 platform. Our evaluation uses the ArgoUML product line to assess the correctness and performance of our approach. The results show that the feature-oriented operations work with high precision and recall for different cases of feature interactions. The performance measurements demonstrate that the clone and pull operations can be integrated in typical workflows of engineers.

Keywords

  • Feature-oriented development
  • Distributed development
  • Variation control systems
  • Software product lines

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-85347-1_6
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Acknowledgements

The financial support by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs, the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development, and KEBA AG is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Christian Doppler Laboratory MEVSS, Institute of Software Systems Engineering, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

    Daniel Hinterreiter & Paul Grünbacher

  2. Institute of System Software, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

    Herbert Prähofer

  3. Institute of Software Engineering and Automotive Informatics, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

    Lukas Linsbauer

Authors
  1. Daniel Hinterreiter
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  2. Lukas Linsbauer
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  3. Herbert Prähofer
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  4. Paul Grünbacher
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paul Grünbacher .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Prof. Ana C. R. Paiva

  2. Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Paris, France

    Ana Rosa Cavalli

  3. University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal

    Paula Ventura Martins

  4. University of Castila-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Ciudad Real, Spain

    Ricardo Pérez-Castillo

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Hinterreiter, D., Linsbauer, L., Prähofer, H., Grünbacher, P. (2021). Feature-Oriented Clone and Pull for Distributed Development and Evolution. In: Paiva, A.C.R., Cavalli, A.R., Ventura Martins, P., Pérez-Castillo, R. (eds) Quality of Information and Communications Technology. QUATIC 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1439. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85347-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85347-1_6

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