Managing Software Product Line Evolution by Filtered Editing: The SuperMod Approach

This chapter introduces SuperMod, an approach and tool to support the evolution of software product lines (SPLs) by means of a filtered editing model, which is inspired by the checkout-modify-commit workflow established in version control systems. Version control system (VCS) Rather than forcing the developers into editing multi-variant artifacts of an SPL, SuperMod allows them to perform modifications successively in single-variant workspaces and to integrate the changes by indicating the logical scope, i.e., the affected variants, of the change performed. The SPL itself is managed automatically in a transparent repository by the system. As a consequence, developers may re-use the same engineering tools they also used for the development of the product variants prior to the re-engineering process. SuperMod furthermore orchestrates collaborative development and provides dedicated support for (without restricting developers to) model-driven approaches to SPL engineering. We illustrate SuperMod’s capabilities by the well-known graph SPL example and discuss the practical benefits of the suggested solution to SPL evolution as well as its relation to SPL re-engineering.