Integrating Compositional and Annotative Approaches for Product Line Engineering

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (C. Kästner, S. Apel)
Sat, 05 Mar 2016 18:41:39 -0500

Christian Kästner, and Sven Apel. Integrating Compositional and Annotative Approaches for Product Line Engineering. In Proceedings of the GPCE Workshop on Modularization, Composition and Generative Techniques for Product Line Engineering (McGPLE), pages 35--40, Passau, Germany: Department of Informatics and Mathematics, University of Passau, October 2008.

Software product lines can be implemented with many different approaches. However, there are common underlying mechanisms which allow a classification into compositional and annotative approaches. While research focuses mainly on composition approaches like aspect- or feature-oriented programming because those support feature traceability and modularity, in practice annotative approaches like preprocessors are common as they are easier to adopt. In this paper, we compare both groups of approaches and find complementary strengths. We propose an integration of compositional and annotative approaches to combine advantages, increase flexibility for the developer, and ease adoption.