A Delta Oriented Approach to the Evolution and Reconciliation of Enterprise Software Products Lines
Abstract
Over the last years, software product line engineering has been applied and adopted by different companies. Existing software product line approaches promote the development of a centralized infrastructure of core assets that addresses the common features and provides variation points to the integration of the variable features of the SPL. In the context of distributed development of enterprise information systems, there are several scenarios where the adoption of these centralized approaches is not enough to accommodate the several requests for the integration of new features and maintenance of existing ones. In such scenarios, the SPL engineering team needs to fork the SPL core assets in order to address the customer needs and due to the marked pressure. In this paper, we propose a delta - oriented approach that promotes the reconciliation of software product lines that are independently evolved. Our approach allows: (i) the automated detection of feature conflicts of the SPLs independently evolved; and (ii) the resolution and merge of such feature conflicts.