Towards Tool Support for History Annotations in Similarity Management

Status
Presented at IFL 2014

Authors
Thomas Schmorleiz and Ralf Lämmel

Abstract
When a system is needed in different variants to meet different requirements, then some form of product line engineering may need to be used. In practice, it is often preferred to develop the variants in a loosely coupled fashion as opposed to the regime of a proper ('explicit') product line from which to derive variants by some generative mechanism. For instance, the 101haskell chrestomathy (a subchrestomathy of 101) contains many similar, small, Haskell-based systems that are indeed maintained in loosely coupled fashion. In previous work, we and collaborators have proposed an approach to manage such loosely coupled variants by using a virtual platform and cloning-related operators. In this extended abstract, we sketch a concrete method with a supporting tool, Ann, for exploring the similarity of variants and annotating them with metadata accordingly. As a direct result, a propagate operator is enabled to automatically propagate changes across variants and to synthesize a to-do list for remaining manual actions. We sketch the method and the tool's application in an ongoing case study for capturing and improving the similarity of the Haskell-based variants of the 101haskell chrestomathy.

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Bibtex entry 
@inproceedings{ifl14-ann,
  author    = {Thomas Schmorleiz and Ralf L{\"a}mmel},
  title     = "{Towards Tool Support for History Annotations in Similarity Management}",
  booktitle = "{Preproceedings of IFL 2014}",
  year      = {2014},
  note      = "4 pages"
}