WG211/M14Laemmel

Similarity management for sets of variants

Speaker: Ralf Lämmel, University of Koblenz-Landau

Acknowledgement: This is joint work with Thomas Schmorleiz.

Software system are often developed as a set of variants to meet diverse requirements. Two common approaches to such development are ”clone-and-owning” and software product lines. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. In previous work, we (and collaborators) proposed an idea which combines both approaches to manage variants, similarities, and cloning by using a virtual platform and cloning-related operators.

In this presentation, we describe a related approach to similarity management which combines techniques of similarity analysis (including clone detection) for software variants, annotations for similarity maintenance tasks, and a semi-automatic process for propagating changes across variants. We outline the automated metadata extraction process and the system for annotating similarities. We explain how the implemented system can be integrated into the workflow of an existing version control system (Git). We present a case study using the 101haskell corpus of variants.