About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Abstract
We consider the problem of supporting effective code reuse as part of Software Product Line Engineering. Our approach is based on code forking - a practice commonly used in industry where new products are created by cloning the existing ones. We propose to maintain meta-information allowing organization to reason about the developed product line in terms of features rather than incremental code changes made in different forks and to detect inconsistencies in implementations of these features. In addition, we propose to detect and maintain semantic, implementation-level require relationships between features, supporting the developers when they copy features from different branches or delete features in their own branch, thus facilitating reuse of features between products. Our approach aims at mitigating the disadvantages of the forking mechanism while leveraging its advantages. We illustrate the approach on an example, and discuss its possible implementation and integration with Software Configuration Management systems. Copyright © 2012 ACM.