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Abstract:
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Research in Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE ) traditionally focuses on product derivation . Prior work has explored the automated derivation of products by module composition . However , it has so far neglected propagating changes (edits ) in a product back to the product line definition . A domain -specific product should be possible to update its features locally , and later these changes should be propagated back to the product line definition automatically . Otherwise , the entire product line has to be revised manually in order to make the changes permanent . Although this is the current state , it is a very error -prone process . To address these issues , we present a tool called Paan to create product lines of MS Word documents with back -propagation support . It is a diff -based tool that ignores unchanged fragments and reveals fragments that are changed , added or deleted . Paan takes a document with variation points (VPs ) as input , and shreds it into building blocks called tiles . Only those tiles that are new or have changed must be updated in the tile repository . In this way , changes in composed documents can be back -propagated to their original feature module definitions . A document is synthesized by retrieving the appropriate tiles and composing them . |