Cost and Benefit of Embedded Feature Annotation: A Case Study
Wenbin Ji · UWSpace (University of Waterloo) · 2014
I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii In software industry, organizations often need to develop a set of similar software-intensive systems in order to satisfy different requirements of customers. In the literature, it has been traditionally recommended that organizations adopt Product Line Engineer-ing—an approach that uses a set of shared assets to derive the variants. However, in reality, organizations usually develop multiple variants using the clone-and-own approach, in which a new product is developed by cloning and modifying the assets of an existing product. Although the clone-and-own approach has several advantages, it can easily lead to inconsistencies and hardness to manage product portfolios. In both the clone-and-own and the product line engineering context, the concept of feature can be used to characterize different variants. A feature is a function unit of