Software Evolution in Time and Space: Unifying Version and Variability Management (Dagstuhl Seminar 19191)

Abstract

Effectively managing versions and variants of software systems are among the main challenges of software engineering. Over the last decades, two large research fields, Software Configuration Management (SCM) and Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE), have focused on addressing the version and the variant management, respectively. Yet, large-scale systems require addressing both challenges in a unified way. The SCM community regularly faces the need to support variants, while SPLE needs versioning support. However, neither community has been successful in producing unified version and variant management techniques that are effective in practice. This seminar aimed at establishing a body of knowledge of version and variant management techniques. Together with industrial practitioners, we invited researchers from both fields to conceive an ontology of SCM and SPLE concepts, to identify open problems, and to elicit and synthesize practitioners' challenges and requirements. These outcomes provided the basis to create a research agenda, research infrastructure, and working groups, and finally, to establish a benchmark for evaluating future research results. As such, the seminar enabled research on enhanced version and variant management techniques that will ultimately be adopted in practice.