A variability aware configuration management and revision control platform
Lukas Linsbauer, Alexander F. Egyed, Roberto E. Lopez-Herrejon · 2016
Modern systems need to run in many different contexts like hardware and software platforms or environmental conditions. Additionally different customers might have slightly different requirements towards systems. Therefore software systems need to be highly configurable and provide variable sets of features for different customers. There are various approaches to developing and managing such systems, like ad-hoc clone-and-own approaches or structured software product line approaches for each of which again several different techniques and tools exist to support them. While the different approaches come with advantages they also have several disadvantages and shortcomings. Some work only with specific implementation artifacts (e.g. source code but not models) and others exist only as plugins for specific IDEs which makes them intrusive or even unusable in some development environments. In our work we present a development process and tools for managing and engineering of highly configurable and variable systems that is generic, incremental, flexible and intuitive. We evaluated our approach on several case study systems from various different domains and origins like open source, academia or industry. The results so far showed promising results.