Feature-oriented clone and pull operations for distributed development and evolution

• DOI: 10.1007/s11219-022-09591-4
• Publication Date: 2022-05-25T09:04:37Z
• Authors: Daniel Hinterreiter; Lukas Linsbauer; Herbert Prähofer; Paul Grünbacher
• Keywords: Feature (linguistics); Granularity; Feature model; Software product line; Merge (version control); Domain engineering

Abstract Software companies frequently customize and extend product lines in multiple projects concurrently to quickly deliver solutions customers. Engineers use a distributed feature-oriented development process, commonly supported by version control systems track implementation-level changes. For instance, feature branches are widely used add new or modify existing features. However, when merging back features the line, information about feature-to-code mappings is usually lost. Furthermore, granularity of limited branches, making it hard extract merge selected individual from one another. This paper thus presents clone pull operations for development, which implemented FORCE 2 platform. Our evaluation uses variants ArgoUML line investigate correctness performance our approach. The results show that work with high precision recall different cases interactions, also implementations scattered across many locations source code. measurements demonstrate can be integrated typical workflows engineers.