SPLEMMA: A Generic Framework for Controlled-Evolution of Software Product Lines

Managing in a generic way the evolution process of feature- oriented Software Product Lines (SPLs) is complex due to the number of elements that are impacted and the heterogeneity of the SPLs regarding artifacts used to define them. Existing work presents specific approaches to manage the evolution of SPLs in terms of such artifacts, i.e., assets, feature models and relation definitions. Moreover stakeholders do not necessarily master all the knowledge of the SPL making its evolution difficult and error-prone without a proper tool support. In order to deal with these issues, we introduce SPLEmma, a generic framework that follows a Model Driven Engineering approach to capture the evolution of a SPL independently of the kind of assets, technologies or feature models used for the product derivation. Authorized changes are described by the SPL maintainer and captured in a model used to generate tools that guide the evolution process and preserve the consistency of the whole SPL. We report on the application of our approach on two SPLs: YourCast for digital signage systems, and SALOON, which enables generation of configurations for cloud providers.