Simulating the Evolution of Clone-and-Own Projects with VEVOS
Alexander Schultheiß, Paul Maximilian Bittner, Sascha El-Sharkawy, Thomas Thüm, Timo Kehrer · 2022
In clone-and-own development, new variants of a software system are typically created by manually copying and adapting an existing variant. This approach is flexible but suffers from various challenges such as high maintenance cost in the long term. While researchers started to address the challenges of clone-and-own, there is yet little empirical evidence on the efficiency and effectiveness of clone-and-own research. The main reason for this is the lack of appropriate benchmarks, which need to expose a multitude of different data and meta-data serving as input and ground truth for experimental evaluations. We present VEVOS, a benchmark generation framework that picks up these requirements and, given the version history of a software product line, enables the simulation of the evolution of cloned variants, and provides meta-data serving as ground truth.