Managing Product Variants by Project Centralization
Lei Ma, Cyrille Valentin Artho, Hiroyuki Satō · Lecture Notes on Software Engineering · 2013
Many software systems are evolving continuously.The changes are reflected in a sequence of revised products, including both version updates and related product variants that are created by the clone-and-own approach.Separate management and analysis of these product variants waste storage and hinders uncovering their commonalities and variations for maintenance.In this paper, we explore the project centralization approach to manage product variants.Our technique shares common code whenever possible while keeping the version space of each project separate.We present the key issues of project centralization and its algorithms.We perform several case studies, where project centralization is applied to real-world software projects, demonstrating the potential usefulness of our approach.