Supporting feature-oriented development and evolution in industrial software ecosystems

Abstract

Companies nowadays need to serve a mass market while at the same time customers request highly individual solutions. To handle this problem, development is frequently organized in software ecosystems (SECOs), i.e., interrelated software product lines involving internal and external developers. Individual products for customers are derived and adapted by adding new features or creating new versions of existing features to meet the customer-specific requirements. Development teams typically use version control systems to track fine-grained, implementation-level changes to product lines and products. However, it is difficult to relate such low-level changes to features and their evolution in the SECO. State-of-the-art approaches addressing this issue are variation control systems, which allow tracking of changes at the level of features. However, these systems have not found their way into mainstream development so far. In this thesis we will describe which workflows and additions to variation control systems are required to support feature-oriented development in an industrial SECO environment. We will further investigate mechanisms that support feature-based monitoring to guide the evolution in SECOs.