SiPL -- A Delta-Based Modeling Framework for Software Product Line Engineering

Abstract

Model-based development has become a widely-used approach to implement software, e.g. for embedded systems. Models replace source code as primary executable artifacts in these cases. Software product line technologies for these domains must be able to generate models as instances of an SPL. This need is addressed among others by an implementation technology for SPLs known as delta modeling. Current approaches to delta modeling require deltas to be written manually using delta languages, and they offer only very limited support for creating and testing a network of deltas. This paper presents a new approach to delta modeling and a supporting tool suite: the abstract notion of a delta is refined to be a consistency-preserving edit script which is generated by comparing two models. The rich structure of edit scripts allows us to detect conflicts and further relations between deltas statically and to implement restructurings in delta sets such as the merging of two deltas. We illustrate the tooling using a case study.