Providing the Variation Control System ECCO as a Service
Tobias Bergthaler, Matthias Preuner, Paul Grünbacher, Alexander F. Egyed · 2025
Variation control systems (VarCS) like ECCO or SuperMod provide capabilities for uniformly handling revisions and variants of software systems based on features, in that regard going beyond the capabilities of existing version control systems like Git.However, existing VarCSs have not been designed to be provided as a service, which limits their integration in web-based engineering environments and tool pipelines.In this paper, we present Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) extensions for the VarCS ECCO, which also include a REST API to facilitate its integration in different engineering processes.We present ECCO's SaaS architecture and explain its services for managing repositories, as well as local and distributed operations for feature-based development.We demonstrate the ECCO service by showing its integration with ECCOHub, a webbased platform for working with ECCO, as well as ECCO's CI/CD pipeline.