Feature-Oriented Clone and Pull for Distributed Development and Evolution

Product line engineering aims at quickly delivering individual solutions to customers by customizing and evolving products based on a common platform. Engineers commonly follow a distributed and feature-oriented process, supported by version control systems, to track implementation-level changes. For instance, feature branches are widely used to add new or modify existing features. However, when merging back features to the product line, the information how features map to code is usually lost. Furthermore, the granularity of merging is limited to branches, making it hard to transfer individual features from one product to another. This paper thus presents feature-oriented clone and pull operations for the distributed development and evolution of product lines, which are implemented in the FORCE2 platform. Our evaluation uses the ArgoUML product line to assess the correctness and performance of our approach. The results show that the feature-oriented operations work with high precision and recall for different cases of feature interactions. The performance measurements demonstrate that the clone and pull operations can be integrated in typical workflows of engineers.