Structurally evolving component-port-connector architectures of centrally controlled systems

International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems (VaMoS), pp. 1–9

Abstract

The increasing complexity of software variants demands for variation management techniques suitable for industrial practice. As "clone-and-own" with subsequent manual evolution still is a popular method to create software variants, this leads to product lines that are difficult to maintain and evolve and can produce conflicts when changes occur in both, product line and variant. Where general approaches to differencing and merging handcrafted changes to products perform suboptimally, respecting assumptions on the structure of the architecture can reduce the differencing search space and yield better results. We present a novel method for differencing and merging hierarchical component-port-connector architectures based on the Focus calculus. It leverages assumptions on the distribution of components to facilitate calculating differences between architecture versions and deriving delta bundles to update software products to changes in the underlying product line. Through a (preliminary) survey with 27 participants, we compared the results of our method with the results of manually differencing. The survey showed that this method yields deltas and merge results that are considered correct by the participants. Overall, we found that including assumptions about the architectural style and that grouping related deltas into compact bundles can greatly facilitate merging manually created and evolved products back into their underlying product lines.

Authors 4

1. Jörg Christian Kirchhof Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University Aachen, Germany

2. Bernhard Rumpe⋆ Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University Aachen, Germany

3. David Schmalzing Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University Aachen, Germany

4. Andreas Wortmann Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University Aachen, Germany