Granularity in software product lines

  • Authors:

  • Christian Kästner;Sven Apel;Martin Kuhlemann

  • Affiliations:

  • Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany;University of Passau, Passau, Germany;Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Building software product lines (SPLs) with features is a challenging task. Many SPL implementations support features with coarse granularity - e.g., the ability to add and wrap entire methods. However, fine-grained extensions, like adding a statement in the middle of a method, either require intricate workarounds or obfuscate the base code with annotations. Though many SPLs can and have been implemented with the coarse granularity of existing approaches, fine-grained extensions are essential when extracting features from legacy applications. Furthermore, also some existing SPLs could benefit from fine-grained extensions to reduce code replication or improve readability. In this paper, we analyze the effects of feature granularity in SPLs and present a tool, called Colored IDE (CIDE), that allows features to implement coarse-grained and fine-grained extensions in a concise way. In two case studies, we show how CIDE simplifies SPL development compared to traditional approaches.